PhotoIreland Festival 2018

I am delighted to say that my forthcoming exhibition No Place Like Home is part of the exciting and stimulating program of the 2018 PhotoIreland festival!

Check out the listing here on the Open Program page and do please visit the exhibition in Ballina Public Library from the 31st of May 2018.  I am in the middle of my final preparations at the moment, the first print rolled off my printer yesterday:

And last week I test hung some test prints to test out how I am going to do it all.  I plan to hang the work unframed using nails just like in this video.

So if you are around the Sligo/Leitrim/Mayo area please do call in to see the work and leave me your feedback in the visitors book or send it to me in the comments section below!

Exhibition Opening

Mweelrae, Connemara

 

Sligo

I am very excited to post about my upcoming exhibition of my project No Place Like Home which is also part of the PhotoIreland 2018 festival program!  The exhibition will open at the public library in Ballina on the 31st of may with a private viewing and an artist talk and will run for 2 weeks.  If you are reading this post then please come along to view the work once the exhibition opens and please leave me some feedback there – or here in the comments section below! 

The work came about after we moved to live in the west of Ireland in 2012.  Before I came to live here my perspective of the place was informed by time spent here on holidays.  Once I moved here that perspective changed completely and I became curious about the long association between rural life and a romantic, utopian view of the countryside that seems to have deep roots in the human psyche that can be traced back to ancient Greek and Rome – we seem to be forever longing to return to some long lost, imagined paradise.  In my opinion the present Wild Atlantic Way sits well within the same tradition and it was the imagery used that first got me thinking about romanticism and landscape and the strong links between the two, in fact I would say for a long time for me these were inseparable.  When I went out to photograph the landscape  I focused on creating images like the first image at the top of this page and I edited out all the non picturesque scenes such as the second image that I came across without really considering why.