the horror room
Murals were created during the summer of 1976 by teenagers attending a youth club in Antrim, Northern Ireland. Through time the paintings began to take on a more sinister appearance and as they degraded in the damp environment the figures grew more spectre -like . During the day the youth club also served the local school as a detention room to facilitate the punishment of pupils and it was through this association that the room became notoriously known to the children as ‘The Horror Room’.
In 2001 the artists uncovered this find and documented the murals just before the building was demolished. The deteriorated images were digitally preserved in 2008 and they are now re-presented as archaeological records. The Horror Room murals are presented in a format suited to museum display implying that the context within which an artefact sits is as important to their ‘reading’ as the information they contain.