Artist
Aoife Herrity
Aoife Herrity is an Irish photographic artist and writer based in Dublin. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University. Her ongoing graduate series Sleeping Dogs Lie was selected as a PhotoIreland TLP Editions publication and was published in 2020. Herrity is a guest lecturer at IADT Dun Laoghaire and has led workshops at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin. Herrity’s work has been shown at a number of exhibitions in Ireland and is held in public collections with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Office of Public Works. Private collections are held in Ireland, Canada and the USA.
Herrity’s current area of interest relates to the wider subject of childhood sexual abuse, speciıcally trauma responses, implicit memory and the grooming process. Much of this work is brought about by research into literature, personal histories and psychology theory. Herrity works with photography, the written word and archival material as a means to unpack and examine these complex histories. Exploring these themes through critical writing is also central to Herrity’s practice.
Sleeping Dogs Lie
Rumours, secrets and absent memories can affect the stories we tell about ourselves and where we come from. Conflicting narratives, faulty recollections and admonishments often bring unsettling questions to the surface. These lingering questions sometimes reveal gaps; exposing ruptured and converging narratives, causing our personal and family histories to appear as multiple realities. By examining these altered narratives, how and why they are tampered with or ignored altogether can be very revealing. Collective suppression and denial can tap into our deeper instincts, tugging at our intuition and implicit memory, leaving us to decipher and reinterpret based on our knowledge at a given time. These uncovered histories can cause agitation and conflict within ourselves and our families; their very presence casting long shadows that follow us into adulthood.
Sleeping Dogs Lie explores the darker sides of memory, the suppressed narratives and the vacuum of knowledge surrounding insidious experiences and their aftermath. Acknowledging the body’s various threat responses and subsequent protective measures invites greater understanding of complex traumatic encounters. This body of work aims to address the complexities involved in difficult and sensitive histories. By conjuring a psychological landscape, the viewer is invited to confront this sense of unease and to question subjective memory as a protective measure.
Looking at the universal through the personal are Clare Lyons and Aoife Herrity. Aoife’s practice is well grounded in her academic research, producing work that is calm and reflexive, and oftentimes understated. Rather than illustrating the complexities that memory and its failings conjure in the personal and the familial, with its altered or suppressed narratives, her work provides us with a series of unsettling scenes. Expertly produced, purposely hypersharp, and exuding a tedious grey, the images present a collection of tableaux without characters, depicting a troubling reality somewhere between nostalgia and memory.
Similar in topic, but with a very different visual language, Clare Lyons speaks of personal experience and trauma, and there is a sense of experimentation where the photographic fails to deliver. It is in this experimentation where she succeeds in her explorations, playing with low-fi printing and against the grain of the sharp and accurate, as much as with folding the resulting images to provide objects with obscure narratives. Such devices contribute to her conversation on such difficult topics, ambiguous and hard to unfold.
Audrey Gillespie’s practice brings together a diversity of media such as analogue photography, painting and printmaking, conversing around universal themes. Drawn from personal experience or direct account, they reflect the concerns of young minds around personal identity, sexuality, and the anxiety of contemporary generations. Her work is set in the context of Northern Ireland — seeped in a heavy and traumatic political history with ongoing conflicts of belonging amongst the youth.
These three artists manage to preserve the tension of such circumstances, but in doing so the viewer discovers sublime notes of everyday life, hidden between these persistent concerns. Meanwhile, Jialin Long and Mark Duffy look at the relationship between individuals and the state.
Jialin Long, though only a recent graduate, has already established a name for herself in Ireland, notably through her graduate project Red Illuminates, exploring the concept of culture in socialist countries and how state loyalty is cultivated. Using multimedia approaches and strategies, she explores social and political issues, but also personal issues such as belonging and cultural traditions, in order to propose alternative positions.
Mark Duffy has distilled over his last projects a distinct style, somewhere between satire and documentary, where humour serves as a catalyst for a poignant conversation around key political issues. Having moved to London and while working at the House of Commons as a photographer, his life and practice suffered a dramatic turn when his unflattering images of politicians became the focus of attention of the Parliament media team, followed by a random house raid and other pressure strategies from the UK government. Leaving the position and continuing with his practice beyond this incident, Duffy engages with current affairs, such as Brexit, with his characteristic approach.