Halfway Home
Halfway Home is a project exploring family, travel and Irish identity through documentary film and photography. I made a fifteen-minute film combining interview, narration and archival footage, following a journey from my home in Scotland back to Ireland with my mum and grandad. Alongside the film, I produced a series of photographic prints made during the journey.
The work looks at questions of belonging and inheritance through everyday moments and shared stories. It traces connections across places and generations, from talking head interviews to quieter observations captured on the road. At its heart, Halfway Home is about how travel can become a space for reflection, and how family stories help shape our sense of where we come from.
The work looks at questions of belonging and inheritance through everyday moments and shared stories. It traces connections across places and generations, from talking head interviews to quieter observations captured on the road. At its heart, Halfway Home is about how travel can become a space for reflection, and how family stories help shape our sense of where we come from.
01 — Brighton to Glasgow
Departure
Departure
The journey begins at home. Leaving Brighton with Mum, we move north through familiar cities and long train corridors. There’s an in-between feeling: bags on laps, changing platforms, quiet anticipation. Each transfer marks a step further from the domestic and closer to something older, half-remembered.
Glasgow to Belfast
Crossing
Crossing
In Glasgow, the pace pauses. Then the route turns west: train to Ayr, coach to Stranraer, ferry from Cairnryan. The ferry becomes a threshold – sea and weather forming a border that’s felt more than seen. This section holds the crossing itself, where land gives way to motion, and anticipation builds.
Portaferry
Arrival
Arrival
Usually, we arrive together – me, Mum, and Pops – in a town shaped by memory. Portaferry familiar, and somehow distant. The journey ends here not with spectacle, but with recognition: the ordinary power of standing still with the people who brought you here.
Halfway Home
A record of movement and memory
A record of movement and memory
This film threads the fragments: trains, roads, ferries, waiting rooms. It weaves voice and silence, image and time. It’s not just a document of where we went – it’s a reflection on belonging, the edges of identity, and the spaces we pass through to find each other.