* On the corners of Cork and Ardee Street in Dublin 8, sits the ruin of a house. All that remains is the exposed back wall, an open wound of bricks. It could be the wall of a room on a film set, or stage. Over the years, I’ve passed it on buses, in taxis, my eye always drawn to the same spot: two fireplaces, suspended high up, one floor above the other. Cast iron, cream surround, the lintel on each – extraordinarily, for a centuries-old building exposed to the elements – still intact. I have been writing stories in my head about them for years.

* I encountered them again recently. Once, flashing by as I dashed for a train; and in the same week, via an Instagram account dedicated to the past. Its grid posts are of ghost buildings and signs; of objects that no longer exist as they once did, but persist in an altered form. The account revels in obsolescence, or possibly our collective sense of nostalgia.

* This part of the city is deeply connected to my family. The site of the Ardee ruin is a stone’s throw from where my maternal grandmother lived in Pimlico, her family’s first home after the tenements. My mother was born on Cork Street, 150 metres from those fireplaces. It’s also the street I was born on, and where 20 years later, I got my first job after college because I could type 70 words per minute.

* Every time I look up at the gaping mouth of these sky-suspended fires, I wonder who set them every morning. The ritual of scrunching paper, the sparing use of coal. What was cast in: peelings, sticks, a letter containing bad news.

* The height adds to their ghostliness or godliness. The stairs of Anja Buchheister’s Possible Ending are a phantom flight to who knows where, or a kind of infinity. Elevated objects make me think of ascension to heaven. Rachel Fallon’s ladder to the sky, The Assumption, is divine elevation, escaping the squalor of earth. Like the grimy tenement where my great-grandmother told people’s future based on their cards in a poker game. I see her in Jane Hughes’ Fortune Teller. Women with such abilities were ridiculed and disbelieved, but Catholicism blithely accepted the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception verbatim, in contrast to the testimonies of thousands of girls in Mother and Baby Homes, deemed liars and sinners for what had happened to them.

Ascension, Assumption. Religious A words that suggest Religious R words:

Rebirth, Renewal.

Fire is the purest representation of the Holy Spirit, right?

* What accumulated acts happened in front of those fireplaces? Secrets confessed by its light. The mundanity of clothes drying on chairs; poor ventilation mottling the walls with mould. The /wall /that /still /stands is a theatre prop, resembling Gijsbrecht’s framed illusion, and Kathy Tynan’s meta-response.

Behind the frame / behind the façade / behind this eidetic architecture /

* Artist Gillian Lawler believes her work Edgelands IV is informed by abandoned places. They are backdrops that “create a vista, allowing us to imagine an alternative timeline or dimension”. The fireplaces resurrect my female ancestors and their hard labour, the meagre fires they bustled about. The ashes may be long gone, but as psychogeographic objects, these hearths are a portal through time and space. I can almost hear someone say: Come sit by me.

* Was the crackle and roar a comfort to whoever lived there, the room lit by candles, the sound of horses on cobbles outside? If I pass by at night, especially at Christmas, I imagine the ghosts of a family, exchanging paltry gifts [my mother told me of her delight in the 1950s at being given a single orange] but the figures around this fireplace are indistinct, anti-cellular, an * of Miriam O’Connor’s animals in the gloam.

* The butterflies left behind in Siobhan McDonald’s Silent Witnessing – like the family I have conjured around the fireplace – are an accidental archive, a thing that was never created but exists.

* Féileacáin. Butterfly. My favourite word in the Irish language.

* I could shimmy up a ladder to this scene of cheer and stockings hung. Drape a string of fairy lights on the mantel. But when I get there, the faces are masks, unknowable in this diorama of the past I’ve created.

* For months, I’ve been waiting on a mask to arrive. I don’t yet know what it will look like, but it will be ceramic, with a mix of fruit, flowers or foliage. A future mask, if you like, by artist Holland Otik, it will not exist until it’s in my hands. Some might find the faux faces Otik makes creepy, but to me they are ritual objects, rooted in folklore and myth. Handmade, unique, in contrast to the kind Kathy Tynan’s son wears in the feeling still deep down is good. Cheap, mass-produced, non-biodegradable: the kind of plastic Halloween mask every 1980s kid wore to perform spookiness, otherness and glad to be given fruit in return (that single orange abides).

* I had almost finished writing this piece when a worrying rumour reached me. Something was happening to the fireplaces, so I went to investigate, heart in mouth. Scaffolding surrounded the building (I took this as preservation) and it was covered in a curtain of green builder’s net. It looked more like a theatre than ever, a now silent space where millions of words were once spoken. I squinted, fearful, but there, behind the curtain were the familiar cast iron rectangles. Still inviting us to tell stories, and by their survival, still offering hope.

Sinéad Gleeson is an Irish author and artist. Her debut novel, Hagstone, was published this year. Behind the Curtain continues until 25 August