Absinthe hour – oil on Canvas, 2017 I first encountered the work of Eleanor McCaughey in 2015 when I saw her solo exhibition Image is Everything in Dublin’s Eight. There McCaughey collated and presented an Americana she had fictionalised using found photographs that depicted American diplomats and their families during the Cold War years. In that show hints existed to the new shift in direction her practice was about to take, and in the intervening years I voyeuristically watched this evolution through social media – peppering it with real life contacts at various exhibition openings. It was at one of those recent…