Psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’…  In Mortal Engines, Harry Walsh Foreman views the city in a way a travel writer might, like he is a visitor to his own city. The images produced are both familiar and strange. He makes ink drawings that plot out journeys and familiar pathways he takes as part of his daily routine. Walking from the Liberties where he lives to his studio near the Five Lamps. In this exhibition at the CHQ Building on Dublin’s Docklands, Walsh Foreman utilises the space to expand on ideas from within a visual diary of daily happenings across the city. In this process, the artist documents then revisits, develops and edits. Sketches from his notebook are expanded into a gallery space in the creation of graphic novel-style maquettes or dioramas.

Volume One was Walsh Foreman’s MA exhibition based on a day trip to Glasgow, Volume Two was Futures at the RHA, Volume Three was situated in Belfast, at the Catalyst Arts Centre, Volume Four was in the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon. and Volume Five was in the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon This installation of Mortal Engines, Volume Six, follows the Luas as it winds around St James’s Hospital, down the Ell to Heuston Station, past the Croppies’ Acre, and on through the city centre before reaching the CHQ Building.

Walsh Foreman utilises the gallery space to scale up these sketches so we can walk among them. In this way, he contributes his own narrative formed from the quotidian, referring to people that he nods to, chats with or sees around Dublin in his daily life. They inhabit the space and allude to the larger-than-life character of these people that Walsh Foreman pays homage to. The figures, made of card and acrylic paint, move among this depiction of the urban landscape, as though on their own routine journey.

Walsh Foreman describes a process of moving through the city and later reimagining the vignettes from memory through drawing. He might be on the bus home, looking out though rain-dappled windows, and spot someone huddled, sneaking a smoke in a darkened doorway of a pub. The spark of the lighter illuminates the contours of her face momentarily and she might drift into a daydream. The bus moves off before the third puff and later a drawing is made through the impression of recollections. Fleeting perspectives that offer glances into different worlds within the same geographic area.

There are recurring characters, people that Walsh Foreman crosses paths with regularly in a way that is specific to small cities like Dublin. There’s a sense of familiarity in their depiction. Sometimes there are quotes accompanying these characters, maybe scrawled on the flipside of the cardboard. Outward pleasantries, inner anxieties, witticisms and one-liners suggesting a collective character of the area through the people that inhabit it. In this way a snapshot emerges of the emotions and behaviour of individuals as they navigate this terrain.