Blog

I will be featured in the current series of Imeall, the bilingual arts programme on Irish language channel, TG4.

The episode will be shown on TG4 at 11:20pm on Monday 16th January and repeated on Tuesday 17th at 7:30pm. It is also available on the TG4 player.

I ndiaidh sos gearr, tá an tsraith iomráiteach ealaíne IMEALL ar ais ar TG4. Ó 2008 i leith tá léargas dátheangach á thabhairt ag Imeall ar na healaíona agus ar chultúr na hÉireann ón imeall isteach, ag insint scéalta pearsanta ealaíontóirí agus mór-ealaíontóirí ó cheann ceann na tíre.

TG4’s award-winning flagship bilingual arts series, Imeall, is back. Shot on location, Imeall provides a wonderful insight into the work of our leading arts practitioners as we catch a glimpse of their creative magic.

A group exhibition of work from Uphold — an online platform for selling and promoting the work made by artists in Northern Ireland — opens on Thursday 3rd November at 6pm in 35DP, Donegall Place, Belfast.

Thanks to Uphold for their work in organising this exhibition and providing their not-for-profit online platform for artists.

Works in New Collections address themes and issues such as displacement, belonging and nostalgia; transgression and resistance; individual and collective expressions of self; queer identity and desire; nature, the body and society through a variety of media including photography, sculpture, painting, textiles, print, ceramics, drawing, design, and installation.

Exhibiting artists, designers and collectives include: Aisling O’Beirn, Alex Synge, Array Collective, Bassam Al-Sabah, Dorothy Hunter, Emma Wolf-Haugh, Grace McMurray, Hannah Casey-Brogan, Helena Hamilton, Jan McCullough, Jennifer Mehigan, Jill Quigley, John Macormac, John Rainey, Katie Watchorn, Mark Mcgreevy, Martin Boyle, Michael Hanna, Miguel Martin, Phillip McCrilly, Rachael Campbell-Palmer, Sean Greer, Soft Fiction Projects, Susan Connolly, Susan Hughes, Tara McGinn, Thomas Wells.

I am pleased to have been asked to participate in an exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI) in Paris opening in November.

The exhibition will include work from my Rural Fluorescent project, alongside work from Megan Doherty, Rachel Glass and Jan McCullough. It runs alongside L’Irlande de Martin Parr, and will include a response from each artist to Parr’s work. The exhibition is presented as part of the Paris Photo and Photo_Saint_Germain festivals, and will run from Friday 11th of November until Sunday 8th of January.

The opening will take place on Thursday, 10th of November, and will be preceded by a guided tour of the exhibition by the artists.

From the CCI website:

Iconic British artist Martin Parr has been taking photographs in Ireland since 1979, where he also lived for a few years at the beginning of the 1980s. This fascinating visual chronicle captures the significant social and cultural changes that have taken place in the country over four decades. From images taken during the Pope’s visit to Ireland or at traditional Irish livestock fairs and dance halls to exploring the influences of Americanisation, the Celtic-tiger era and, latterly, the shadow of Brexit, Parr’s singular talent as a documentary photographer combines with his affection for the country, its people and their evolving lifestyles. These photographs are shown at the Centre Culturel Irlandais together with works by four photography alumni of Belfast School of Art at the University of Ulster - Megan Doherty, Rachel Glass, Jan McCullough and Jill Quigley - where Martin Parr is a visiting Professor.

Further details and opening times from the CCI

I am pleased to have work included in a group exhibition in Draíocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin, opening in November. Part of their Making Art: Photography exhibitions, Creative Gesture will include work from my Velvet & No. 9 series alongside work from Gary Coyle, Joe Lee and Jan McCullough.

Many thanks to curator Sharon Murphy for including my work.

The exhibition will run from Wednesday 2nd of November 2022 until Saturday 28th of January 2023 in the ground floor gallery at Draíocht, alongside Selected works from the National Photography Collection in the first floor gallery.

More information on the Draíocht website

I am extremely happy to be taking part in the exhibition ‘Swallowing Geographies’ curated by Rachel Botha. It opens in RCC Letterkenny and Glebe House, Donegal, in October.

Swallowing Geography is a dual-venue exhibition and public programme at the Regional Cultural Centre and Glebe House & Gallery in Donegal. The intent of this exhibition is to observe the dynamics between belonging and exclusion in response to the Donegal context. It presents the lived and imagined experiences of inhabiting space, while exploring our engagement with geographical, domestic and digital worlds.

The title Swallowing Geography is borrowed from Deborah Levy’s novella which questions the idea of home – “Is home a good place? Or just somewhere to return to?”– and expands on our perception of belonging. The exhibition attempts to share the complex narratives about securing a place in the world where belonging is measured alongside exclusion, and broadly shares experiences of migration, displacement and marginalisation.

The exhibition includes a broad selection of artworks from the Arts Council Collection by Bassam Al-Sabah, John Beattie, Carmel Benson, Pauline Bewick, Deirdre Carr, Francis Carty, Carey Clarke, Felicity Clear, Dorothy Cross, James Dixon, Genieve Figgis, Hannah Fitz, Margaret Fitzgibbon, Martin Gale, Anita Groener, Patrick Hall, Patrick Hennessy, Patrick Jolley, Eithne Jordan, Allyson Keehan, Louis le Brocquy, Ruth E Lyons, Marielle MacLeman, Eleanor McCaughey, Sibyl Montague, Ciarán Murphy, Isobel Nolan, Mairead O’hEocha, Nano Reid, Constance Short, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Rajinder Singh and Andrew Vickery; Caroline McCarthy from the Irish Museum Modern Art Collection; and new commissioned work by Donegal artists Cara Donaghey, Laura McCafferty, Eoghan McIntyre and Jill Quigley. The commissioned exhibition text is written by Emily Cooper and Dean Fee, editors of The Pig’s Back journal.

The official opening takes place on Saturday 15 October, 6pm – 9pm, at the Regional Cultural Centre and Sunday 16 October, 2pm – 5pm, at the Glebe House & Gallery.

Regional Cultural Centre opens Saturday 15 October to Saturday 17 December, Tuesday to Friday, 11am – 5pm, Saturday, 1pm – 5pm.

Glebe House & Gallery opens on Friday 7 October to Wednesday 30 November, Monday to Sunday in October, 11am – 5pm / Saturday and Sunday in November, 11am – 4pm.

More details on the RCC website

I’ll be taking part in a panel as part of the PhotoIreland workshop “Photography - An Empathetic Gesture?”, on Thursday 25th August. The panel will discuss “Gesture and the Unfixed State”.

Part of the Photo Ireland Festival 2022, the one-day ‘Think Tank’ addresses contemporary photography in Ireland:

For a people and an island, traditionally and historically represented visually by those outside of itself, photography has provided a means of self-expression – a form of visual investigation from the inside out – of what it means to be of this place. Such a tool, such magic, in both the realm of close-up magic and photographic magic, ‘is a multisensory experience that calls – instantaneously and without our consciously knowing it – upon our capacity to script our own sense of visual reality’.³

The objective then of this Think Tank, is to begin to understand the ways in which the gestural capacities of contemporary photography and its associated forms are used as language in the context of the mutable and multiple ‘States’ within which we live now.

For more information and to book attendance, see the Photo Ireland website.

Thanks to the convenor Ailbhe Greaney for inviting me to participate.

Some images from the Builds exhibition in the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Donegal. The exhibition features an installation of work from both my Repaints and Velvet & No. 9 projects.

The exhibition continues until 3rd September 2022.

An exhibition of my recent projects will open in the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal on the 25th June 2022. It will include installations of two projects - Repaints and Velvet & No. 9.

The exhibition runs until 3rd September. Details of the exhibition on the RCC website.

Thanks to the Regional Cultural Centre for inviting me to exhibit this work.

Velvet & No. 9

This installation is focused on a series of photographs recording an interaction with a Dublin house undergoing renovation. As the site is in a state of deconstruction it encourages the imagining of how it could become a place of domestic comfort and self-expression. Velvet curtains are used to refer to this possible future domesticity and inhabitation and are combined with construction materials to create objects which relate to the house but have their own presence in the gallery space.

Repaints

In a project looking at basic mark-marking in architectural space, photographic material of interior walls being painted is taped to a wall and painted with similar techniques and tools. The photographic documents of these actions record the basic gestures of applying paint to walls as subject and process, both merging as the wall is increasingly disrupted by the gestures of painting over time.

You can see this project on this site: Repaints