“Fleming’s artistic courage in confronting the fragile glory of the human body is exemplary, as indeed is her insistence on an artistic practice that does not shirk its responsibility to history, its intimacies and atrocities. She moves beyond the beautiful to provide a deeply moving, and ultimately redemptive response to suffering. 

Her engagement with Irish music, dance, history, folklore and mythology during her time in the west of Ireland has been a personal exploration of her own family origins and an artistic extension of her preoccupation with the female body, its capacity for endurance and healing, for self-creation and self-destruction. 

The photographs exhibited here as part of her encounter with Ireland, past and present, are a glorious assertion of the feminine, an attempt to excavate and reclaim a hidden history occluded by colonization, deGaelicisation, and misogynist distortions of religious belief, by the wilful suppression of the female body. They are playful, beautiful, vulnerable, mindful, undeterred by the mutilations of time and the indignities of age, determined to find new life and hope among the ruins.” 

Louis de Paor, Director, Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway     Meitheamh 2017