The artists nominated by
Over the last decade, PhotoIreland has become a key constituent of the Visual Arts, offering from Dublin an annual photography festival, running a cultural hub in Dublin, publishing OVER Journal, and developing constructive channels with a strong network of organisations worldwide. PhotoIreland is dedicated to ensuring that a healthy ecosystem of practices is not silenced by lack of opportunities by offering frequent publishing and exhibiting opportunities to emerging artists.
The artists selected for the fourth year of Futures demonstrate the vibrant diversity of practices on and from the island of Ireland, and present a broad range of interests, defining what Irish photographic practices are today.
Looking at the universal through the personal are Clare Lyons and Aoife Herrity. Aoife’s practice is well grounded in her academic research, producing work that is calm and reflexive, and oftentimes understated. Rather than illustrating the complexities that memory and its failings conjure in the personal and the familial, with its altered or suppressed narratives, her work provides us with a series of unsettling scenes. Expertly produced, purposely hypersharp, and exuding a tedious grey, the images present a collection of tableaux without characters, depicting a troubling reality somewhere between nostalgia and memory.
Similar in topic, but with a very different visual language, Clare Lyons speaks of personal experience and trauma, and there is a sense of experimentation where the photographic fails to deliver. It is in this experimentation where she succeeds in her explorations, playing with low-fi printing and against the grain of the sharp and accurate, as much as with folding the resulting images to provide objects with obscure narratives. Such devices contribute to her conversation on such difficult topics, ambiguous and hard to unfold.
Audrey Gillespie’s practice brings together a diversity of media such as analogue photography, painting and printmaking, conversing around universal themes. Drawn from personal experience or direct account, they reflect the concerns of young minds around personal identity, sexuality, and the anxiety of contemporary generations. Her work is set in the context of Northern Ireland — seeped in a heavy and traumatic political history with ongoing conflicts of belonging amongst the youth.
These three artists manage to preserve the tension of such circumstances, but in doing so the viewer discovers sublime notes of everyday life, hidden between these persistent concerns. Meanwhile, Jialin Long and Mark Duffy look at the relationship between individuals and the state.
Jialin Long, though only a recent graduate, has already established a name for herself in Ireland, notably through her graduate project Red Illuminates, exploring the concept of culture in socialist countries and how state loyalty is cultivated. Using multimedia approaches and strategies, she explores social and political issues, but also personal issues such as belonging and cultural traditions, in order to propose alternative positions.
Mark Duffy has distilled over his last projects a distinct style, somewhere between satire and documentary, where humour serves as a catalyst for a poignant conversation around key political issues. Having moved to London and while working at the House of Commons as a photographer, his life and practice suffered a dramatic turn when his unflattering images of politicians became the focus of attention of the Parliament media team, followed by a random house raid and other pressure strategies from the UK government. Leaving the position and continuing with his practice beyond this incident, Duffy engages with current affairs, such as Brexit, with his characteristic approach.
