and then I ran employs performative self-portraiture, still life, landscape photography and text to visualise O’Connell’s grandmother’s escape from one of Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes. These homes, run for over 200 years primarily by Catholic nuns and covertly funded by the state, housed unmarried mothers and their children and doubled as orphanages and adoption agencies. Women were often forced, through a perverse religious morality, to give their children up for adoption against their will, and live and work in appalling conditions of neglect and abuse. The final mother and baby home (often known as Magdalene Laundries) was closed in 1998. It is estimated that up to 100,000 young women and children were imprisoned since the establishment of the homes, thousands of whom died and were buried in mass graves.

O’Connell’s project is concerned less with death but the brutality of survival, separation, and the broader culture of conservatism and shame in Ireland. Her grandmother was just sixteen in 1964 when she climbed out of a window of a mother and baby home in County Westmeath, heavily pregnant, and ran. She gave birth to a son—O’Connell’s father—in Dublin, but he was swiftly removed to an adoption home, and wouldn’t see his mother for another 37 years. 

and then I ran delicately explores themes of loss, escape, trauma and hope through three intertwining elements. Black and white self-portraits depict O’Connell both re-enacting her grandmother's escape and performing a choreographed representation of loss. Methodologies of repetition throughout the work are a nod to Freudian theories of “repetition compulsion” caused by trauma, in which difficult experiences are revisited and repeated again and again even if the original trauma has been suppressed from memory. Colour imagery situates O’Connell’s family story in the present day, revisiting significant sites and landscapes. The shutter release cable, an explicit component in the construction of several images, acknowledges photographic production as a method of reclamation, making visible stories that have been cruelly concealed.