Writing a Crime / Reconstructing a Crime is a hybrid sculptural and cinematic object that interrogates the aesthetics and narratives of crime through critical engagement with cinematic stereotypes, public memory, and national identity. At its center stands a haunting outdoor sculpture: a carriage pulled by two horses facing opposite directions, torn in tension. Installed on the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at various other locations in Dublin for filming purposes, the object serves as both a prop and a monument, functioning as one of five central sculptural elements created for the experimental short crime film. 

This dual function—as both a cinematic prop and an autonomous public sculpture—creates a liminal space where reality and fiction collide. Visitors are invited to encounter, activate, and ultimately deactivate these sculptural remnants in various public settings, transforming passive viewing into a performative and participatory act. These objects, stripped of their original narrative in the film, become ghostly witnesses to unseen crimes, echoing the way public monuments can obscure or mythologize historical violence.

The project critically engages with the legacy of crime as portrayed in Irish and British cinema, where class, colonial history, and urban mythology converge into often reductive and stylized representations. Whether it's the "troubled Irishman" or the "English gangster," cinema has long trafficked in stereotypes that conflate crime with identity. Writing a Crime / Reconstructing a Crime reflects on these cinematic tropes, borrowing filmic dialogue from global crime cinema while recontextualizing it through the act of reconstruction, echoing police procedures as well as cinematic remakes and cultural repetition. These dialogues, once part of sensational narratives, are reframed as fragile remnants of a collective imagination.

The piece also engages conceptually with the deep-rooted social and political conflict between Ireland and England. The historical entanglements of these regions—involving power, resistance, and surveillance—haunt this sculptural carriage. Here, the act of reconstruction becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of arriving at historical truth in postcolonial contexts. Who writes the crime? Who reconstructs it? And who bears its consequences? 

By displacing crime scenes into public space and reactivating them through sculptural form, this work critiques how societies remember violence and aestheticize trauma, as well as how cinema participates in shaping public perception. The sculpture of the divided carriage resists narrative closure. It becomes an impossible vehicle, an image of motion forever thwarted, an escape that has consistently already failed. In this way, the work gestures toward the impossibility of fully reconstructing crime, whether in film, history, or lived experience. This work remains a fragmented archive of gestures, symbols, and silences, inviting the audience to inhabit the dissonance between image and meaning, spectacle and substance.