This Hurts explores obsession, release and fantasy. Running in circles, building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Questions that ease me and questions that haunt me. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout the work, in the form of subtext and saturation while I try and snatch fleeting moments before they are gone, clinging to whatever brings me release. I fixate my anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories creating colour saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for me to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
This project documents queer youth through my personal interactions, stumbling around Northern Ireland, driven by a hazy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleared emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form with 35mm format photography, colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse into a self-constructed fantasy. As a young queer female artist, examining my own existence and the imprints I have made takes place continually throughout my work, as a lingering subconscious echo. Reacting to my intrapersonal conflict I use photography as a way of documenting, validating the existence of my thoughts.
Though much of my work is personal, emotional and ties to inner issues, I cannot escape the climate, environment and identity that I exhibit and are influenced by. The decision to open up this extremely personal monologue is becoming a strange form of catharsis, creating and displaying outwardly the visual narrative of queer female sadness, mental illness and grievance from Northern Ireland is radical in itself.
