Artist
Chris Finnegan
Chris Finnegan is a visual artist and arts educator from Cork who works primarily through photography. His work explores everyday occurrences, mundane objects and events.
Recently moved back to Ireland after a decade in the UK, his current practice centres on the home and suburbia; critically interrogating ideas of home-making, childhood and the domestic sublime. He regularly collaborates with his young sons.
He has exhibited work extensively in Ireland, the UK and internationally, including; the 192nd RHA Annual Exhibition, Institute of Photography Penryn, GoMA Glasgow, Fringe Arts Bath, the LA Centre for Digital Arts.
Solo exhibitions include Someone Else’s Somewhere at the Mills Centre, London in 2015 and House Rules at 6 Central Avenue in 2022. In 2023 his photographic series House Rules was published by PhotoIreland as a TLP Edition. He is a recipient of the Agility Award 2023 from the Arts Council Ireland.
He holds a BA Fine Art from TUD, Dublin and has recently completed a Masters in Photography with Falmouth University.
The Grammar of Home
You can picture a house. You can imagine its constituent parts and associated objects, the actions and routines carried out within its walls. A child can outline a shape that most would say is a house.
But how do you show home? How do you use the right words, forms and shapes; a vocabulary that truly illustrates the meaning of home? How do you share the feeling of home? Is it possible to show our instinct of and yearning for home?
The Grammar of Home seeks to negotiate these questions and hopes to propose answers to some of them.
This body of work presents photographs of objects and places that collectively attempt to map out an idea of home; a concept that is universally held but is somewhat incommunicable and unique to each of us. As this work unfolded, a visual language of primary colours and rudimentary shapes came from somewhere deep within my psyche and I was reminded of forgotten moments, beloved toys and much-watched television programmes of my childhood. I have come to understand that these formative memories are enmeshed with my personal definition of home and I reenact and revisit them here through photography.
So far, the work has been presented as an artist’s book. Mirroring the form and scale of the Ladybird series of children’s books, the twenty-six photographs in this edition are offered to be read as a collection of individual elements, a visual ABC of sorts, and also as a narrative whole. An open-ended reading is facilitated through the book’s concertina format and much like the idea of home, the reader is invited to make their own decisions on how to navigate and experience it.
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.