Falling Into Its Walls in Now and Then Part III: 40 Years of Northern Irish Photography at Belfast Exposed Gallery

Works from my larger body of work Falling Into Its Walls were presented in Now and Then: Part III, curated by Dr José Luís Neves. The exhibition explored the concept of place in contemporary photography, considering how environments shape and are shaped by human experience through the themes of Home, Traces, and Identity. My work was included in the section Traces, which brought together photographs that reveal places indirectly through fragments, traces, and/or visual clues. Rather than offering straightforward representations, these works encourage viewers to reflect on the histories and realities that lie beyond the image, addressing issues such as borders, conflict, and urban transformation while drawing attention to their wider social, cultural, and political contexts.

The work formed part of a larger body of work, Falling Into Walls [and Flyover], 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 mix 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.