An Fios Dorcha: Designing Ritual as Artistic Research in the Irish Diaspora

This exposition presents An Fios Dorcha: The Dark Knowing as a case study within the doctoral project An Dorchadas: The Darkness, a practice-led inquiry into Irish–Australian diaspora, archival absence, and colonial entanglement. The 90-card oracle deck and guidebook are presented here as a designed research system through which fragmentary cultural materials are translated into embodied, participatory form. Emerging from genealogical rupture (where my family’s archival trace ends in fire and silence) and from research at the National Folklore Collection (Dúchas.ie) alongside fieldwork in Ireland, the project approaches folklore and language as incomplete datasets rather than stable inheritances. Bilingual titling, thematic structuring, and material design operate as methodological gestures rather than aesthetic embellishments. Generative AI was used experimentally during visual ideation as a secondary design tool, critically contained within the process. The oracle is therefore treated not as an illustrative artefact but as method: a ritualised publication system through which artistic research becomes relational and enacted, transforming diasporic absence into encounter. keywords: Ireland, Australia, emigration, folklore, diaspora, ritual, divination tools, oracle, publication design