Artist
Audrey Gillespie
Audrey Gillespie is a 22 year old Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland. Currently residing in Belfast, where she graduated from a Fine Arts Ba degree at Ulster University, Belfast School of art in 2020. Her media include analogue photography, painting and printmaking.
Gillespie's themes explore queerness, mortality and conflict with youth and anxiety through her current ongoing series titled 'This Hurts' last exhibited at the Mac, Belfast, in 2020.
This Hurts
This Hurts explores obsession, release and fantasy. Running in circles, building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Questions that ease me and questions that haunt me. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout the work, in the form of subtext and saturation while I try and snatch fleeting moments before they are gone, clinging to whatever brings me release. I fixate my anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories creating colour saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for me to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
This project documents queer youth through my personal interactions, stumbling around Northern Ireland, driven by a hazy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleared emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form with 35mm format photography, colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse into a self-constructed fantasy. As a young queer female artist, examining my own existence and the imprints I have made takes place continually throughout my work, as a lingering subconscious echo. Reacting to my intrapersonal conflict I use photography as a way of documenting, validating the existence of my thoughts.
Though much of my work is personal, emotional and ties to inner issues, I cannot escape the climate, environment and identity that I exhibit and are influenced by. The decision to open up this extremely personal monologue is becoming a strange form of catharsis, creating and displaying outwardly the visual narrative of queer female sadness, mental illness and grievance from Northern Ireland is radical in itself.
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.