Ken Grant introduces the photographers featured in A R C H I P E L A G O, a major new exhibition of Irish photography at the RHA Dublin showcasing seventeen artists, whose practice spans the myriad of themes that concern lens-based culture in Ireland today.
When the cartographer Tim Robinson moved to the Aran Islands in late 1972, he brought with him a life of draughtsmanship and plans to make maps and write. Once there, he might have noticed others drawn to that small archipelago: visitors, passing through hoping to find the distillation of a wider Ireland; engineers preparing for electrification, archivists gathering histories, and even those who'd brought themselves far enough from the crosscurrents of home for their lives to briefly quieten. Once settled, Robinson began an interpretation as humane as it was scholarly. If Ireland was an island at the edge of Europe, he suggested, he’d arrived at a place somewhere beyond that edge and, to understand what he felt, a new map was needed.
The work gathered for A R C H I P E L A G O provides a new starting point too - one, if not of place, then of ideas and preoccupations compelled by a country redefining itself by a gradual distancing from the governance that once led and bound it. Photography in Ireland continues to evolve. For some, the wilful slowing of processes serves to counter an age of speed and precarity. For others, it can forge collaboration amongst strangers, take us to the heart of the home, or broaden, to question the temperament of an entire nation, rethink priorities and propose alternatives.
For Yvette Monahan, motherhood brought one such realignment. Parenthood can change everything; we feel every breeze and stay watchful. Navigating between the universal and the minute, Monahan has made a sensory tracing of a deeply felt world. With the same ambitious reach the Eames brothers once demonstrated in Powers of 10, when their camera pulled away from human life until the world itself was small enough to be cupped in a single hand, she finds wisdom and sacrifice in deep waters and acknowledges the sentience and significance of other life forms. Monahan’s act of photographic immersion is an invitation to listen deeply and reappraise all that matters. She is building an expanded practice with coordinates that lie somewhere near map, constellation and ultrasound. Magnifying, immersing and sensitised with the clarity of motherhood, Unfolding Simple Entities establishes a proposition for a retuned world, and reminds us we’re still capable of wider learning, closer listening, and even redress.
If Monahan proposes a moment to rethink, so too does Clodagh O’Leary, as she photographs Traveller youth and the universal traits of play. O’Leary’s is a dexterous practice. She adapts street photography, bringing it to the page as affordable zines and reroutes city walking tours, to reappraise the ground covered before directing funds to more benevolent outcomes. When introducing Sublicks and Lackeens, she recalls witnessing the mistreatment of Traveller children when just a child herself and works to amplify the kind of uncomplicated living of life that children do so well. Her photographs could show freedom before responsibilities, yet they betray moments when children try on adulthood for size: A boy holds a foal’s mouth ready for inspection, another takes the weight of a horse in his arms, and a mother, barely free of youth herself, holds her son with early confidence. O’Leary’s photographs might yet prime a conversation about better opportunities and shifts in perception. Until then, the horse fairs continue to provide Traveller children with safety, belonging and an alternative to a formal education that so often fails them.
Navigating Ireland will always test the young, not least in its borderlands, where North or South is only betrayed by changes in tarmac or the loss and reboot of a phone signal. From a more linear earlier practice, Kate Nolan’s role is now more complex. Beyond her own photographs, she encourages local children to share something of the border’s physical and psychological impacts on their lives. Testimony, archives, video projection and the voices of the young coalesce, to describe a place at once unremarkable and charged. In Nolan’s portraiture, children born after a time of conflict stand bright as darker woodlands surround them. When it does appear in Lacuna, the land can seem uncomplicated, but it rarely is. Cultivation, ownership and even war has shaped the pastureland here, and forests can foster ideas of play and freedom in a region where the acts of history can be difficult to see but often felt.
Sometimes, it feels as if metaphor is all we have now. Ruby Wallis’s series FuilFréamh & Lus Mór / Bloodroot & Foxglove engages with the garden as a remnant of empire. Working with plant life and their origins, she makes work that alludes to diaspora, migration and colonial histories. Wallis began the series after conversations with individuals living in Direct Provision. Stained, as if blood washed, she uses plant-based pigments and camera-less processes to adapt pastoral scenes once common to Northern Irish Linen production, reappointing them as unsettled Eurocentric Garden landscapes. In translation, they serve as an invitation to consider cultural displacement and reflect on its consequences. Wallis’s approach is committed in its engagement with those experiencing migration, but she’s also astutely aware of photography’s own legacy as a tool of power and conviction. Indeed, for those seeking refuge, photography has always been in close attendance. Whether in service to the State or charity, purposes vary in accordance with the intentions of those who use it. Where once there were humanist narratives, there’s now participation, fracture or ellipsis.
In Conor Horgan’s photographs, tarpaulin and tents become a creased sea at the foot of the Virgin in a Dublin park. Repetitive, tethered, government-issued, they’re photographed as if almost lost in the ink of half-light, speaking of the many, without the folly or indignity that can so often occur with a heavier hand. In the confusion of night, an air-starved stain of grass after a tent’s removal becomes a footprint left after a clearance, and the fencing which first compelled Horgan to begin this work seems heartless, relentless and functional. There are no faces here – the tents are enough to confirm limbo and caution of more to come. In twilit refinement, Horgan conveys massed and sudden rootlessness in contemporary Ireland with tenderness, craft and, as if there could be anything else, anger.
If the polarities between home and security seem wilfully stark, they’re in heavy company. As Ireland’s silicon economies repurpose docklands, across the country older industries are dismantling. In The Rake’s Progress, Fionn McCann uses an approach he describes as 'slow documentary’ to mark the end of the peat manufacturing industry and draw attention to the environmental shifts such changes will likely bring. Stilled industrial buildings seem deeply rooted and sodden gullies stretch across the Irish midlands as if they were endless. But they’re not, and McCann, a former archaeologist, knows he’s sifting the end of an age, as clearly as his portrait of the lean, weather-pinched frame of a peat worker holds the dedication of a working life as his industry falls from the present into heritage.
The labour of an industrial past resonates too in Jan McCullough’s series Jigs. Where once ships were built in the East Belfast docks, teams of fabricators now build fictive cities. TV and film sets are constructed with the help of plywood jigs – hand cut timber guides, made to assist in the cutting and placing of materials during production. McCullough’s allusion to the frameworks and sure footings we look for have evolved into a rich practice built around the structural and the domestic. In this recent work, she brings forward each unique jig piece to create a suite of elegant wooden assemblages. Usually shielded from public view, they are now inflected with the geometry of cubism, each standing as a precise sculpture that affirms its role in guiding the repetitive manual action it was made to support. Pared back to ‘the work of the hand’, Jigs is a singular interpretation of a city’s infrastructure and the hidden ingenuity of labour.
Since returning to Dublin in 2012, Shane Lynam has been building his own understanding of the city. Earlier work in Paris established a preoccupation with the city’s edgelands, with Lynam regularly returning to the same peripheral districts until he recognised how each had evolved through modern history. Made in Dublin over the course of a decade, Pebbledash Wonderland might have served to appraise shifts in development or a capital’s economic expansion, yet Lynam’s engagement is a personal and intuitive one. He moves through the patchwork renovations of breeze-blocked back lanes and uses colour to elevate incidental dramas that spill onto pathways. Lynam, like his contemporary Brían Sparks, is aware of the potential for the vernacular to lend itself to a more interior, subjective rendering of a place his family has settled in. For Sparks, time spent in Italy consolidated a search for surprises in the everyday - those gestures, flaws and prompts that pronounce all we’re close to, when a familiar lane turns towards home or a shift in light affirms a home. Returning to Ireland in 2017, Sparks continued to draw on wider European colour practice. Displayed in grids, his colour photographs bring discreet scenes together whilst retaining the integrity of each observation. In the hands of others, these scenes could be nothing, but Sparks’ lanes are photographed as well as Kavanagh might write of them. They’re photographs borne of care, with a deep knowing of place and the hope, beyond everything, for photography to piece together as a language of belonging. That’s not easy to achieve. Home isn’t always a settled affair, things are left unsaid, and the place Malcolm Mc Gettigan photographs is often seen at dawn after frost, or on late winter afternoons, before curtains are pulled. For all the comfort suggested by such a place, it’s nevertheless winter, and that brings its own paradoxes – for where else is there to seek warmth unless in the place where the past is yet to be reconciled? Take Stock is a response to emotions rekindled when time has passed. Looking at Mc Gettigan’s photographs of home feels like an act of mild trespass. They’re pieces in a private inventory, each ready as a prompt to be pulled out of a box marked ‘return’, whilst the act of photographing itself seems like heightened note making, a reflection on the landscapes of youth, or simply an attempt to gather all that shaped a later life.
The success of Daragh Soden’s first book, Young Dubliners, confirmed his strength as a portraitist of adolescence. In new work, he moves towards a more overt self-portraiture, as he collaborates with drag queens for a series in which the personal and political merge. Working together, Soden and each qrag queen have built a singular tableau, to construct questions around control, agency, and even the very act of looking. Elevations break free of the gallery wall to stand ready for negotiation with their audience, as Soden works to disrupt more conventional notions of power and passivity. He’s found merit in the immersive, in the shared creation of work that speaks to the potential for photography to depict sexuality and reach a deeper understanding of those we photograph. His own presence in the frame arrests the familiar recourse to the exotic, by interrupting sightlines that more usually proclaim difference. Underpinned by a sense of openness and never far from autobiography, Ladies and Gentlemen achieves a representation of sexuality that encourages humility and rewards rethinking.
For Ciara Richardson, the installation serves to challenge us too. In work intent on ‘flipping power’, paper eyes settle like butterflies in vitrines, obscuring, then revealing, as they peel across imagery of naked male sculptures. Richardson’s merging of photomontage and classical history deploys the directness of Dadaism to unsettle stillness, antiquity and attitudes that, despite all we have seen, can prevail. She turns the tables through animated, insistent repetition, exposing inequities with a lightness of touch that’s at once playful, disarming and serious. Richardson’s animations speak to a broadening lexicon in photographic culture, at a time when digital processes and commercial applications have brought the possibilities of the page, projection and scale ever closer.
Pádraig Spillane’s own appropriation of the language of commercial display anchors a practice in which mass-produced imagery is repurposed. Seeing images as unstable, he creates arrangements that reconstitute found material. By tearing and associating elements beyond their original contexts, they pronounce the intensity of sexuality, humour and colour in magazine imagery, as well as the materiality of their own production. Between wall and floor, assemblage and echoes of Pop Art merge in Spillane’s willingness to rip and realign. Though conscious of the sensuality of photography, he never loses sight of its potential as a tool of dissent, whilst taking on the very imagery that sometimes threatens to consume us.
We tend to understand the tensions between art and commerce and the role photography plays in both now. Images run in the service of persuasion, carrying what Jialin Long describes as ‘half-truths, half lies’ as she responds to the limited depictions of women that persist. Her working process has evolved in recent years to become a more reflective absorption, a gathering of information until ideas prompt acts of creative resistance. In her most recent work, a dancer and a rose ‘converse’ in a fusion of projection, still life and symbolism. The rose, just like the white orchid in Long’s earlier Red Illuminates series, serves as a slowly changing timepiece. As it weathers and falls, she prescribes a language for her own internal emotions, whilst never straying far from the social and political imperatives that compel her, as she continues the search to find new ways to engage each with the other.
Despite the many changes the country has seen, the traditional milestones Irish girls experience across childhood persist. First Communions now sit in family calendars that will later list Pageants and Debutante Balls as keenly anticipated stages in a young girl’s life. They’re planned for, saved for, and come along with the joy of ceremony, the encouragement of elders, and the tensions of competition. In Irish Girls, Eimear Lynch photographs the formal occasions as a girl’s life moves from one stage to the next. Her earlier Girls Night series saw her moving across the threshold into Irish homes, to photograph adolescent friendships, conversations and the aching anticipation of nights ahead. In Irish Girls, she continues her interest in girlhood, by photographing rites of passage and the informal moments in between. She’s found a way to hold onto the kinship found amongst girls for whom a religious service is a joyous, uncomplicated early step. At a Miss Teen Ireland event, she photographs the time around the spectacle of performance in a way that might make us acknowledge the pull of consumerism and the pressure that comes for girls swept along in the search for beauty. Between deep rooted tradition and recently adopted customs, Lynch marks the journey girls take, as they grow into a contemporary Ireland through photographs that balance the specificity of place with the universal language of coming of age.
Somewhere between marks on a body and cliffs scarfed over millennia, Izabela Szczutkowska’s Siar sets the intimate against the eternal. Moving to Cork from her native Poland, Siar (from the Irish word for West) is, for her, a reflection on choices and where they take us. The painter Gerhard Richter once wrote about the landscape, cutting across the romantic shorthand many use when trying to describe it, suggesting ‘landscapes feel nothing’. But, set within them, we do. Szczutkowska knows this - she sets rocks in all their unfeeling austerity against young lives that feel everything deeply as they take their next steps. Collage and analogue processes manifest in the freedom she retains to tear and unify distant lands. She builds new places, not so much from nothing, but with the guidance of all those places she has felt something for. In Siar, Szczutkowska brings what has been left together with where she has reached, to create a place reimagined, or newly recognised, a place now called home.
There’s strength in the ability to start anew, but how do we talk about the end of something? On foreclosure, stores fall silent. After bereavement, a home loses its reason. From Inner Dublin to dockland Marseille, forsaken districts are resuscitated by artists until councils or developers, with other ideas of culture, intervene. When Agata Stoinska’s search for a studio brought her to a former mechanic’s garage in Dublin, her background in architecture helped her see the potential of the vacant warehouse that would eventually become D-Light Studios in 2008. Stoinska soon became the catalyst for a confluence of artists and community, in a space that thrived until enforced closure in 2024. Preparing to vacate the building, she was moved to respond to feelings that veered between peace, anger and gratitude. Through acts of ritual, in the form of self-portraits, she marks its passing and, in doing so, touches on where she has reached in her own life. A nurtured plant is held in front of her, and its pot becomes the full, rounded belly of a carrying mother. In video work, four perspectives offer the many personalities only a building known intimately will hold. In meditation, she stands for hours, recording in and through the last hours of light into darkness. It’s a holding on to time - time enough to feel something far beyond the immediate circumstances of a lost building, and just enough to become a short cut to grief as the day, as an era, closes.
As Agata Stoinska was building her community, she probably didn’t think too much about map making, although, like the interleaving of ideas and urgencies in A R C H I P E L A G O, she knows working together gathers energy from disparate places in ways that can change everything. And just as Tim Robinson felt compelled to draft the lives and imperatives of a place beyond the Ireland he knew, she now stands with those ready to build again, to mark out the routes necessary when navigating a changing country and share strength enough to start those journeys together.
A R C H I P E L A G O is at the RHA Dublin until 21st December - find out more here
