Aisling Walsh

The city of Galway is protected from surging tides and increasingly ferocious, year-round, storms by a fabricated wall of rocks stretching from the modest docklands four kilometres west. The promenade, snaking alongside this wall, has allowed the city’s residents a much-needed outdoor respite throughout a year of rolling lockdowns. It is, mercifully, within five kilometres of my sublet and so I break no rules by going there.
I park my bike at the shelter by the diving board where, no matter t...

They did not believe in ghosts but they were scared of them. On weekend visitations they would sleep three-in-a-bed in the guest room of the rented cottage. The older two would fight over who got to share the double bed with the little one and who had to roll over onto the fold-out camp bed. A single bed lay at the far end of the room, but they were ever annoyed enough with each other to banish anyone to that lonely corner. The unfortunate occupant would have to squeeze their eyes shut agains...

The narrow passage of cinder block painted matte white, with its grey industrial carpet and fluorescent lighting was my eventual weekend and summer playground from eleven years of age until my late teens. Left alone to wander the corridor I would do rounds reading over each framed poster documenting theatre performances from the early 80s, before I was even born, to the present.
It was the only exhibition at the public theatre-gallery where my father worked that was not open to the general pu...

Issue One, Work. Available to buy now.
https://noparties.bigcartel.com/product/no-parties-issue-one

Accept or reject: the matter was always in your hands. You could have said no from the first day I arrived on your terrace. The sun was beginning to set behind the neighbour’s mango tree, the sanates were screeching their evening chorus and exasperated rush hour horns blared from the periferico. You were half-sitting, half-leaning, against the flat roof of the downstairs bathroom with a glass of beer in one hand and a joint in the other. I sat opposite, on a white, plastic patio chair, thick ...

CW: emotional & physical abuse, absent fathers, cancer, grief, codependency
There is a photo of me sitting on a low wall in front of the solid black brushstrokes and grey smudges of Joan Miró’s Oiseaux à la naissance du jour. It was taken at Fundació Joan Miró in early January 2019. My head is turned to the side as I pretend not to notice you approaching with your phone out. You rarely take photos of me and I wonder why you have chosen this moment, my puffy eyes still smarting from the previo...

My grandmother and I were sitting in her living room a month before COVID-19 became the only thing that mattered, flicking through her free cable service for something that might appeal to us both. Given that her TV diet consists of reruns of ‘90s quiz shows and True Movies (Ireland’s version of Lifetime), this is not an easy task. She settled on the BBC’s latest period drama. When Suranne Jones appeared on screen, complete with top hat and waistcoat, I realized we were watching Gentleman Jac...

Aisling Walsh profiles La Kenefic: the Irish-Guatemalan Actress Starring in Golden Globe Nominated La Llorona.
I heard of ‘La Kenefic’ long before I ever met her. Actress turned guerrillera, turned Tai Chi instructor, turned film star, Margarita Kenefic has a reputation for creating epic drama on stage and screen. As she inches towards 70 her first foray into film, in Jayro Bustamante’s award-winning film La Llorona, has won her international recognition for her role as the inscrutable wife o...

Analysis: Cacao ceremonies has hit the mainstream, especially with lockdown-related woes increasing its popularity, but the uncritical embrace of it – explicitly marketed as Mayan – is deeply problematic.
A heart opening mirror to the internal world, a sacred space full of flowing energies, and a powerful plant medicine to release your trauma and embrace healing are just some of the benefits promised by the purveyors of the latest new-age trend in spiritual awakening: cacao ceremonies.
For th...

I was 13 the first time my mother threatened to kick me out of her house. I wanted a tattoo for my 14th birthday and she pulled the ‘not under my roof’ card. This became a regular threat of hers in response to my teenage capriciousness, but one that I was inclined to pay heed to. And, it turns out, I was right to believe in the strength of her resolve. Only she waited another four years, until ...

By Aisling Walsh

A spiral of vultures, a gyre of mourning, descended from the sky, flew through the undergrowth, alighted on a flattened shack and began its festival of flesh…

The Vultures, Luis de Lión, Guatemala, 1966

A man with blazing white eyes makes his way down the stairs. His gaze penetrates, not just through the wall of my bedroom, but through the walls of my soul. I feel a thump on my chest and I wake gasping. My nightshirt is soaked through.

It’s dark in the room, nothing moves, th...

The argument that we should be able to separate art from the artist and not let the actions of the latter dictate our judgment of the former has been increasingly challenged as our tolerance for acts of violence and expressions of hatred by once-loved artists and creators dissipates. When it comes to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s most recent anti-trans tweets, trans women, Potter fans, and Potter actors including Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe have condemned Rowling’s latest attacks ag...

When the patrol car pulled to a stop on the dirt road two fields away and three Police officers piled out, we never imagined they were coming for us. A common sight anywhere in Mexico, the appearance of la poli that Saturday afternoon, merited no more than a passing comment from my friends as we rambled over the countryside looking for a shady spot to escape the midday sun and eat our freshly harvested Pajarito mushrooms.
It was a humid July day amidst the sub-tropical hills of Veracruz’s Sie...

The end of the world was far less interesting than anyone had ever led me to believe. Watching it all unfold from behind my computer screen and from the safety of my bed, I felt cheated that the doomsday scenarios of fire and brimstone, promised in biblical verse, did not come to pass. And disappointed that I was neither obliged to ride across deserts looking for a drop of fresh water, nor sail the oceans looking for a fabled scrap of dry land as the epic 80’s and 90’s movies of my childhood ...

Article for Dismantle Magazine on the new-age phenomenon of cacao ceremonies which delves into question of cultural appropriation/exploitation, healing and the new-age hustle that preys on indigenous spirituality.