Bio / statement

Bio

Aisling Keavey (1991) is a photographic artist, moving-image maker, curator, and writer from Dublin, Ireland. Currently based in London, she is a graduate of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology’s MRes course in Photography (2022, 4.0GPA), in which she reflected on the representation of Irish women in Britain post the Good Friday Agreement, and also Wimbledon College of Arts one-of-a-kind (and no longer running) BA course in Fine Art Print and Time-Based Media (2016, 2.1).

She has an intensely research-based practice, which spans photography, archival material, writing, and moving image. Her work focuses on the migration of women from Ireland to the UK, using ethnographic interviews, photography, and moving image to connect histories of migration with the contemporary.

Recent exhibitions include Tsundoku Art Book Far at the Printworks, Dublin Castle, Dublin Ireland (as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2023), Dublin Art Book Fair 2022: A Caring Matter at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Images Are All We Have and On The History and Practice of Photography in Ireland, both at PhotoIreland Festival, July – August 2022; and Photo Fringe online 2020.

She has presented academic papers and posters at various national and international conferences, upcoming presentations include “An Analysis of Liminality in the context of Irish migrant women”, at the Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age, at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. Recent papers and presentations include “An Analysis of Liminality in the Context of Irish migrant women”, Women’s History Network blog online, and “Frederick Douglass’s Visit to Ireland during the Famine” as part of Douglass Week 2023, Rochester NY. She has won various awards for papers and research, including an Emerging Scholar Award and a Research and Innovation Seed Fund for Emerging Researchers from the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology.

Statement
Taking Homi K Bhabha’s theory of hybridity of identity as a starting point for practice-led research, Aisling’s practice incorporates photography, moving image, writing and various other strands of practice to activate research. She has a deep interest in personal histories and narrative storytelling. Intrigued by the way cultural and political factors influence one’s life, she uses her lens-based practice to shed light on the inner life and everyday ‘reality’ of her protagonists

Aisling’s practice finds its concern in the power of photographic image to uncover narratives around historicity and narrative, emphasising exploration around female immigration and collective history. This emphasis on the photographic takes its root in the notion that the photograph is an inherently objective truth-teller, the image as document shows reality, which Aisling uses to explore the themes of memory, collective history and immigration.

Considering the photograph as a research object is integral to Aisling’s practice, and she has strived to develop methodologies which seek to draw attention to this through rephotographing archival photographs, ethnographic interviews and photographic printmaking. Aisling’s personal research practice in concerned with narratives and representations of Irish immigrant women through film and photography. Using moving image and photography, as well as archival images and interviews, she aims to subvert how Irish women are represented through film and photography. Her current project uses ethnographic interview, as well as still photography and moving image to create a representation of individual women and explore their notion of home. The liminal, “third space” of being in diaspora is the site from which Aisling positions her research practice and uses this as both a physical and metaphorical site to explore image-making.

Aisling practice uses photography, slides, archival imagery and video as a space to investigate historical and contemporary representations of diaspora and gender.