Artist
Berta Mars
Berta Mars is a photographer from Barcelona based in Dublin. Her practice is a mix of Portraiture, Documentary and Fine Art Photography, and often explores topics that involve human relationships to capture the essence of people and places from an intimate perspective.
Berta graduated from an Advanced Vocational Training on TV and Media Communications in her hometown.
In Dublin, she enrolled in Griffith College where she graduated in 2023 from a BA (Hons) in Photography. During her final year, she produced “The Loudest Silence” as her graduate project, with which she was shortlisted on the RDS Visual Media Awards and selected to be part of the RADAR program run for PhotoIreland.
Berta’s work has also been part of the annual print fair Halftone in the Library Project several times.
The Loudest Silence
The Loudest Silence is an ongoing project that I commenced in January of 2023 for my final Graduate Project. The idea of this project started from feeling connected to topics that were placing me in a nostalgic position towards the past and my own childhood, drawing me inspiration to explore the distance with home and its people. Slowly I encountered comfort on the idea of exploring the memories I have as a kid and confronting the inevitable changes that come with time to create a dynamic visual narrative.
A crucial turning point happened with the loss of a family house in the Catalan Pyrenees where I spent most of my holidays when growing up. By then, approaching with the camera to that place and documenting the landscape and the lifestyle old and new generations had been following, felt like the right thing to do. By combining my own memories and the present, I created a portrait of what surrounded my life for so long, and I was leaving behind. With this new perspective, I was able to deconstruct the idealised vision of the kid I once was, and I allowed myself to open my mind to new narratives. From engaging with them from a delicate perspective where the viewer is invited to reflect their own personal connections, The Loudest Silence explores the relationship between collective and personal experiences on love, loss, and the passage of time. Topics that can be both universally resonant and intimately personal.
Recent graduate Berta Mars presents her latest work The Loudest Silence – a nostalgic look back at the artist’s childhood memories while also reflecting on a slower way of life exemplified in the represented place. While the topic may not be loudly political, it remains current. The jury praised Mars’ composition in the images, but also the “raw emotional intensity” of them.
Leon Nevill Gallagher explores the lacuna that exists between people influenced by our relationship with the online. Informed by his experience of temporary separation from his girlfriend, he proposes a narrative by visualising the emotions around the spaces created between loved ones in times of distance and reliance on online communication.
Debbie Castro conveys memory loss through the family story of her father and his dementia through the sensitive and considerate editing and narration of his personal family photographs and archives. Her work talks about mental health, especially in the case of the project Age is a Privilege, Unless You Forget!, which reflects on her personal experience of the effects of Alzheimer's on a loved one.
Similar to Castro’s work, Sarah Navan’s ongoing project Care in Progress serves as a cathartic practice to understand a mental state of being – in this case examining her own experience with bipolar disorder. With Care in Progress, she shifts the lens back onto herself and her everyday life as she learns to live anew following her diagnosis.
Also using his everyday life but with a very different approach is Chris Finnegan with his project The Grammar of Home. At times collaborating with his child to present ideas around the definition of a ‘home’, Finnegan critically interrogates ideas of home-making, childhood and the domestic sublime.