Artist
Emma O'Brien
Emma O'Brien is a lens-based artist from Westmeath, her practice is concerned with themes of Mothering, family, childhood and home. In her current project The Holding Place she interrogates her role as mother, worker, and artist. Her work recognises and amplifies the notion that a mothers lived experience is a valid area of artistic inquiry. She aims to continue exploring the changing roles and cultural expectations placed on mothers through the 20th and 21st Century in future work.
Emma has a degree in Photographic Media from Griffith College, Dublin and is a member of Work Show Grow Photography School and Refktor Platform.
Recent achievements include publication of her current project as a TLP edition by PhotoIreland, selected as an emerging talent in Europe by FreshEyes and GUP magazine, this includes publication in the book FreshEyes 2021. The work has been exhibited in Group shows at FreshEyes Exhibition, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2021, PhEST, See Beyond The Sea, International Festival of Photography, Monopoli, Italy, 2021 and Format International Photography Festival, Derby UK 2021. Emma is a Recipient of The Professional Development Award 2020, Arts Council of Ireland and The Agility Award 2021, by the Arts Council of Ireland.
The Holding Place
While balancing unpaid emotional and domestic labour with full time paid work, Emma O’Brien placed her photographic practice on hold. It was an indulgence she couldn't afford, Motherhood demanded this sacrifice. As her child grew, influenced by Matricentric Feminisim and working with a feminist concept of intersubjectivity, “how to care for another and one’s self”, she began carving the time to explore her role as mother and artist. In The Holding Place she finds the quiet moments, the silence and tenderness absent from the intense days of working and mothering. Photographing her everyday, and using her archival smartphone images, Emma celebrates mothering and calls out motherhood.
The Holding Place is a meditation on the physical, psychological and political landscape of Motherhood. The small world that is inhabited, the recurring daily routines, the scant time available, and the intimacy of the mother child relationship all shape the work. Feminism has moved womens life so far so quickly outside the home, but little has changed inside the home. In the work the personal and political blur, She hints at her simmering rage and frustration borne by the imbalances of motherhood while also proclaiming her feelings of love and devotion. In this project Emma aims to show the value of caring and nurturing, while exposing the patriarchal capitalist structures that impose an experience of entrapment on mothers. The work reveals that while motherhood undoubtedly gives a great deal, it also takes something valuable away.
Emma O’Brien is an artist with whom we became well acquainted during her participation in PhotoIreland’s Professional Development Programme. We consider this
nomination an organic next step in her progression as a professional artist. Her work The Holding Place considers the politics of motherhood and domestic labour, exposing patriarchal systems still present within home environments.
Patrick O’Byrne is an emerging artist whose practice, though quiet on first sight, lingers and grows louder within, engrossing the viewer in its multi-layered narratives. In I’ll be damned, O’Byrne looks at the history of his father growing up against the backdrop of Catholicism and alcoholism in Ireland, interrogating subjects of masculinity and sexual identity.
Through the stories and histories of Irish women, artist Pauline Rowan collaborates with a small community of people as they continue to care for a convent and garden
site marked for demolition. Under a Vaulted Sky uses photography, the artist’s own performative response, and collage work to talk about land control and concepts of home and belonging.
Ronan McCall is better known for his commercial photographic work, but we feel his personal practice deserves further attention. McCall is a film photographer, processing and printing his own work. He creates indelible imagery of cinematic landscapes and extraordinary portraits, proffering alternative narratives of reality whilst commenting on pertinent issues.
Through playful approaches, Cian Burke investigates the role of imagination in scientific systems and methods of work. His project, I fear that the magic has left this
place, takes a Swedish government manual – titled ‘If Crisis or War Comes’ – as a departure point for meditations on home, the future, threat and protection.