FUTURES: Announcing PhotoIreland Talents 2025
PhotoIreland announces the 5 artists selected to join the FUTURES…
![Hello all! I’m Jake Hughes, a photographer from County Armagh, and welcome to my Instagram takeover for PhotoIreland! I recently graduated with a BA in Photography and Video from Ulster University in Belfast, and I’m grateful to have been selected for the RADAR residency.
My work explores my experience with obsessive compulsive disorder, focusing on familiar environments like my hometown, Keady—a small village near the Northern Irish border. Through my images, I examine the connection between place and comfort, documenting spaces that feel uninhabited and isolated. These locations reflect the way overthinking affects me, showing how certain places can reinforce anxiety rather than soothe it.
Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing my graduate exhibition, ‘The Destructive Comfort of a Thinking Machine’. I’ll walk you through the photobook, the displayed images, my creative process, and the photobooks I made before this one.
Project Statement:
“To establish my own connection between existence and comfort, I observe my hometown, Keady, through a fictionalised lens—reflecting on how obsessive-compulsive disorder shapes my thinking. I found myself becoming too comfortable in an imagined reality, and the decay of this place made me feel like I was aging alongside it. The only way to escape was to recognise nature’s power to adapt and restore, helping me see myself as part of that process.”
All images shown are from ‘The Destructive Comfort of a Thinking Machine’ (2024).
[This post is part of a series of RADAR Artist takeovers. The current takeover is by artist Jake Hughes]](https://photoireland.org/apps/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)
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