Opening: 6pm 2 April
Running 6-23 April
At The Library Project
Every month from July 2016 to July 2017, a special presentation will be hosted at The Library Project for two of the selected artists at a time. The presentation will include a display and a publication for each artist’s project.
Find out more and pre-order your copies at newirishworks.com
Miriam O’ Connor
Tomorrow is Sunday
Following the untimely death of her brother in 2013, O’ Connor returned home to live and work the family farm. Her ongoing project engages with this unanticipated homecoming. The work seeks to make sense of this incomprehensible experience, and as part of the process, the camera is used to register fragments from habitual routines and day-to-day life. O’ Connor also draws upon farming diaries and notes kept by her brother as another course in which the complexities of her situation might be explored.
Inspired by these diaries, their subjective, yet matter of fact nature, a similar methodology is currently being adopted in the creation of a series of logbooks which catalogue precise activities characteristic of farming life. These logbooks or inventories, while acknowledging the past, propose a kind of counter-narrative in communicating daily circumstances from another perspective. The ‘logbook’ aspect of the project will support the photographic strand as it continues to evolve and develop, and both elements will be shown together when exhibiting the work.
Emer Gillespie
Fallen Women
The severe and judgmental attitudes towards women who became pregnant outside of marriage permeated the ethos of virtually all Church and State agencies in 20th century Ireland. Church and State were bound in their conceptualisation of unmarried motherhood as degenerate and sinful. The tragic outcome of this is that generations of mothers and babies were forced apart.
As an unmarried mother at the age of 21 in the Ireland of 2002, Gillespie had the choice to keep her daughter. But in 1975, for her mother, then aged 20, there was no choice and she was forced to give her son up for adoption shortly after his birth. A similar story can be told of two more of her aunts, one as recently as 1985. Stirred by the secrecy and concealment of these events within her own family, and inspired by an emerging familial and societal consciousness of the experiences of unmarried mothers and their children, this project seeks to recognise, respect, listen to and hear from those women our society so entirely failed.
About New Irish Works
Selected by an international panel of 23 professionals, New Irish Works brings you a selection of 20 projects and 20 photographers representing the diverse range of practices coming from Ireland. New Irish Works 2016 is a year long project of 10 presentations and 20 publications that aims to highlight the great moment Irish Photography is experiencing.
The artists selected are Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Aisling McCoy, Caitriona Dunnett, Dara McGrath, Daragh Soden, David Thomas Smith, Eanna de Freine, Emer Gillespie, Enda Bowe, Jan McCullough, Jill Quigley, Kate Nolan, Mandy O’Neill, Matthew Thompson, Miriam O’Connor, Noel Bowler, Robert McCormack, Roseanne Lynch, Shane Lynam, and Yvette Monahan.
Every month from July 2016 to July 2017, a special presentation will be hosted at The Library Project for two of the selected artists at a time. The presentation will include a display and a publication for each artist’s project. The two artists that will be presented during PhotoIreland Festival 2016 are Daragh Soden and Mandy O’Neill.
As part of the project, PhotoIreland will bring New Irish Works abroad at key events like PhotoEspaña, with the support of the Embassy of Ireland in Madrid, and to Paris during Paris Photo, with the support of the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Culture Ireland.
