Artist
Pauline Rowan
Pauline Rowan received a distinction for her MFA in Photography from Ulster University in 2019. Since graduating Rowan has been invited by Paul Seawright and Peter Richards to exhibit in Dissolving Histories – New Narratives, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast. Rowan was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary in both 2020 and 2021. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Rowan explores sanctuary, as well as home, through landscapes, settlements and our underpinned relationships with belonging and abandonment. With a background in Fine Art and Film, her predominately lens based works incorporate documentary as well as collaborative and performative elements. Rowan is interested in layers of history in place, family and society, systems of defensive and offensive tactics used upon land, home and ritual.
Under a Vaulted Sky
Under a Vaulted Sky is a long term project based in Ireland. Rowan worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a deconsecrated Irish convent and its abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. Her collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents, its previously evicted nuns and her mother who was raised in a convent. The project looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden and our cultural repetition of the need to control land. It reflects this through the history of women in Ireland and through personal family narrative. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed. As a consequence a long standing, ancient link of this site with nature, worship and propagation was severed. An extensive body of work, it consists of portraits, still lives, field documentary and is intertwined with her own performative responses. This project has been created in an important time in Irish history, when it is separating itself from catholic religion and re-finding its relationship to spirituality. While this system falls apart the remnants of a pagan past can be seen emerging.
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.