Press Release
No Place Like Home
New Colour Work by Irish Photographer Fionán O’Connell - The Hilliard Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri from September 5th, 2009
Born in Dublin in 1961, self-taught in photography. The strongest influences on his work are his father, Joseph O’Connell, a landscape painter and artists including Mondrian, Kandinsky, Man Ray and David Hockney. More biographical information and details of previous shows can be seen at www.fionanoconnell.com
Artists Notes
The title of this show began as a very simple working title, one I had every intention of changing when the time came. However, as I assembled the pieces for the show, it slowly evolved into seeming more and more appropriate in my particular context. The photographs here aren’t representative of Ireland – I doubt any one of them would make it into a coffee-table book of Photographs Of Ireland. So, thinking this way, they will appear to many as not being inherently Irish, that they are not at all like home. There’s an element of displacement here; the shots aren’t recognizable, yet they are very much a part of a hidden Irish landscape. Unfamiliar to most, these details are the fragments which actually make up my reality, my home.
Photography is such a massive medium with absolutely everything on Earth on the visual menu. Some make rural or urban landscapes, others shoot war-zones, social documentary or portrait while others point their cameras at the dark, open skies. The movie shot where the camera moves quickly from a wide-screen shot of the planet-filled galaxy and hurtles towards earth, through the stratosphere, clouds, across a landscape, over a city bristling with skyscrapers, diving down onto some bsuy avenue and finally entering a particular window or a particular building, settling finally on a single, isolated detail- a face, a hand, an eye, a key or a gun…..Well, I feel like that goes some way to describing how I work. I rarely try to record the wider picture, seeking out instead the often tatty, flawed beauty in the detail which so often goes un-noticed as rush about our daily lives.
This show, therefore, has no sweeping Irish landscapes, no shots of Dublin’s newest landmark monument, The Spire and no shots of old men sipping pints of dirty black stout or freckled-faced redhead children playing with a rope and an old cardboard box in some inner city slum. Instead, you get what you see- a slightly skewed perception of an old country turned new, reflected only in these silent details. My photographs don’t attempt to describe the change the country is going through but simply record tiny details of it in images which I want to be beautiful in their own right without any requirement for social statement.
When I first came to Boston in 1986, I left a very different country to the one I now live in. Dublin was a relatively grim place, grey, smoky & generally delapidated but it wasn’t, as many commentators claim, depressing or claustrophobic. Sure enough, we didn’t have any fast food restaurants, street sculptures, scenic bus tours for our visitors, no light rail system, late night clubs, fluorescent neon signs, state-of-the-art sports grounds, swimming pools or trendy café bars with free WiFi. We didn’t have any of what we now enjoy but the city radiated a distinctive charm, an artistic integrity which bubbled up through the cracks in the footpaths finding expression in its’ famous art, music, literature, newspapers and bars. It wasn’t a black & white city, but the colours certainly seem to have been desaturated with the passing of the years. Still, this is what my work grew out of and one of my projects for the future is to return to those years and re-present the city as I saw it in those early eighties.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, I’m here in Kansas City with a set of images, all taken in the last couple of years. My interests remain similar to my older work- detail, abstractions, color spaces carved up in different proportions, compositions usually created for their own sakes, but there are subtle changes in how I see things now. I’m not really interested in the reality of what lies around me- there are enough people recording that. This is just about shapes, forms, compositions and colour and how they really do have a subconscious effect on the lives of the people who live in this environment.
We are all going through some difficult times and in a genuine attempt to ease the burden on people who might like to brighten some corner of their home with one of these unique images of Ireland, I have, especially for the Kansas Irish Festival, reduced the prices to less than half of the normal price.
