Falling Into Its Walls [Flyover] in 'Images are all we have' Exhibition: PhotoIreland Festival Dublin 2022

Works from my project Flyover, part of Falling Into Its Walls body of work, were presented in Images Are All We Have, a survey exhibition created by PhotoIreland Foundation. The exhibition traced the thematic development of the photographic discipline and contextualised the historical background, bringing together the diverse and socially engaged set of contemporary art practices that define Contemporary Irish Photography today.
PhotoIreland framed this ambitious exhibition within the second instalment of the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Ireland — a public-facing research project run by PhotoIreland since 2019 that aims to investigate the ideal prototype space to actively engage with Visual Culture and Critical Thinking today.

The work [Fyover] formed part of a larger body of work developed while I became increasingly aware of the city’s (Belfast) architectural fabric, particularly its ordinary and often overlooked buildings, many of which seemed on the verge of disappearing. These spaces began to resonate with my own unconscious psychic reality. I found myself wandering the edges of the city centre, moving among the remnants and traces of its industrial and Victorian past, searching a way to apprehend, delineate and deal with this fading space.

As I began to work, I soon grew fascinated with this unsettling feeling that returned in my images through animalistic and severed haunting forms, which somehow evinced an undertone of self-directed emotional violence and self-destruction, so characteristic of melancholic disorder.
Through photography, reflective and creative writing, and film, in this work, I aim to re-map spaces in cities intuitively and libidinally, while dealing with notions of time and duration. Falling Into Its Walls and its sub-series Flyover mixe narrative repetitions with images of a fragmented built environment, inviting the viewer to delve into its imagined and melancholic space, and to apprehend the weight of its history.
In a more latent form, this work also suggests questions around the personal and collective desire to remember or forget the past, as determining positions towards the social and political understanding of the city.