Artist
Sarah Navan
Sarah Navan is a Photographic Artist living in Co. Clare. Sarah graduated her BA in Photographic Media from Griffith College Dublin in 2022.
Sarah is in receipt of the inaugural RADAR Research and Development Artist residency. Having been selected by Inspirational Arts and PhotoIreland from nominations by eleven Photography programmes across Ireland.
Her project Care in Progress has been longlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Award 2022 and was awarded the Agility award from the Arts Council in 2023.
Care in Progress
I have been developing Care in Progress since 2018 in Ireland and abroad. Care in Progress began as a coping mechanism for my treatment, hospitalisation, and life living with Bipolar Disorder. The work is an in-depth exploration of coming out of a Bipolar manic episode and starting afresh or just trying to get by. I was a single mom, trying to go back to college as a mature student, while also working as a healthcare assistant at night. I needed to relearn how to live with this new diagnosis.
It's my job to care for my son, my mother, my grandfather, my patients at work, and now myself. I am still struggling with it. I use documentary snapshots to document moods such as depression, suicide idealisation, hypersexuality, and apprehensiveness. Juxtaposed with bouts of euphoria and elation or simply being content with life.
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.