Commemorative projects, born out of conflicting memories, can be problematic. Catherine Marshall challenges the coarsening of history by the construction of commemorative monuments that are thought to provide closure over the events that they mark. She explores how imaginative artists help us to work into and through the past. Through the vitality of her artists, at home and abroad, Ireland and the diaspora have attempted to come to terms with some of the inherited legacies of the Great Hunger, the most devastating event in modern Irish history.