Artist
Miriam O'Connor
Irish artist, Miriam O’Connor lives and works in Cork. She holds a BA in photography from Dublin Institute of Technology, and completed a Research Masters at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire in 2011. Drawing inspiration from the language, sights and sounds of the everyday, O’Connor’s practice frequently engages with matters which reflect her everyday surroundings, as well as her day-to-day experiences of being a photographer. Her projects have explored themes around looking and seeing; the relationship between camera and subject; the circulation and consumption of images and the complex nature of photographic representation.
Her work has been exhibited and distributed extensively, with features in magazines and publications including; Camera Austria, Source Photographic Review, The New York Times and The Guardian. Recent solo shows include Sternview Gallery, Cork, Galleri Image, Denmark, The Third Space Gallery, Belfast and during ‘THERE THERE’ festival, Cork curated by Stag & Deer. In 2012, she received the Alliance Française Photography Award, which included a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. She was the recipient of the Emerging Irish Artist Residency Award [EIARA] in 2015 which included a month-long residency at Burren College of Art, Co. Clare. Publications include, ‘Attention Seekers’ (2012) ‘The Legacy Project’ (2013) and ‘Tomorrow is Sunday’ (2017). She was one of the selected artists for Greetings from Ireland (2015) and New Irish Works I & II (2013, 2016). In conjunction with Galleri Image, Denmark, she recently produced new work for FRESH EYES - International artists rethink Aarhus, which was exhibited during Aarhus Capital of Culture, 2017.
Tomorrow Is Sunday
Tomorrow is Sunday is a long-term photographic project which explores my return to the family farm following a family bereavement in 2013. Throughout this time, the camera, and other practices of reading, writing and observing have been employed as tools to negotiate this challenging and unanticipated return. Adopting a slow and reflective approach, I began to document aspects and encounters from day-to-day life, gradually producing logbooks and inventories of routine farm tasks and domestic duties, reviewing animals, fields, trees, rocks, farm tools and the prevailing passage of time. This scrupulous approach of logging, compiling and indexing is driven by a desire to comprehend this complex transition and reflects an effort to regain some semblance of order where past and present might begin to reconcile in some way.