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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’.

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

Images from Cottages of Quigley’s Point will be exhibited as part of the Cairde Sligo Arts Festival in an outdoor exhibition at Rosses Point in Sligo, starting from the 2nd July 2022 and running until 29th July. The exhibition also includes work from Linda Brownlee, Kenneth O’Halloran and Yvette Monahan. Full details of the exhibition and other events in the festival are on the Cairde Sligo Arts Festival website. Many thanks to the Cairde Festival for including my work.

Some things I made at my recent short residency at PS2 in Belfast.

I will be taking part in a short residency in PS² in Belfast from 7th - 11th of October. Thanks to PS² for the opportunity to develop my current project in a gallery space. There are several artists taking part in the short residencies programme over the coming months - you can see more details on the PS² website.

I am pleased that pictures from my project Cottages of Quigley’s Point has been included in the exhibition, Island Life: Photographs from the Martin Parr Foundation. The exhibition takes place from 18th May to 31st October in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery as part of the Bristol Photo Festival. Details on the festival website. “Lougherys 1” and some of the images from the exhibition are included in this article from The Guardian: Drinkers and dreamers: Martin Parr’s favourite images of postwar Britain and Ireland.