Photographic artist / cultural researcher
I originally had this up on the main section of my website but then I thought that I should just leave that for art- and conceptually driven projects so blogging about it instead!
I shot these portraits for the Agagpe Ministries website a couple of months ago and I’ve only just gotten around to posting them up now!
Well, long time no speak!
A lot of updates to go though in this post – not least that I’ve just moved back to London after being home in Dublin for six months.
July 2016: we got through the Wimbledon College of Arts degree show (big ups!)
September 2016: moved back to Dublin and tried in vain to get a job in London and in Dublin
March 2017: moved back to London, much to my delight
Also in March: put a deposit down on a studio space at Hotel Elephant in Elephant and Castle (more on that in a later post)
April 2017: turned 26 (boo!)
Also in April: invested in a studio light setup (finally!) – check my Instagram profile
Other things: photo-book dummy. Accidental Journeys is going to be an actual physical BOOK. Thanks to William and Dirty Illness. More on that – process images, sketchbook photographs, design iteration images, and printing – to come in later posts!
Project planning: I shot another roll of HP5 a couple of weeks ago and finally got it processed and printed. I’m so happy with how the images turned out. Check back soon to see it on the website. I’m also planning to have done four projects by the end of 2017, updates on these on the blog as they happen – research, process and final images.
1.
People get tetchy around people with cameras. The Express train to Gatwick is deathly quiet and my camera is obnoxiously loud. This process of image=-making without knowing how to image will turn out is freeing, yet at the same time, terrifying. Is this about the abstraction of blurry, over-exposed images? Or is it about the process?
My degree project was a book documenting the Irish Diaspora’s journeys from Ireland to England. I photographed and interviewed people in the various Irish centers around London: the London Irish Center, the Luton Irish Forum and the South London Irish Association. The book itself was hand-printed and bound but my bookmaking skills are very lacking! As such, I enlisted the help of my friend Chloe (a 2015 UAL Wimbledon graduate in Print and Time-based Media) to help me fix the binding and structure of the book itself.
Chloe won the Wandle Studio Prize for 2015/16 so she has use of a studio space at Merton Abbey Mills where she runs an “alternative book-makery” called Object Book.
PS: I’m doing photo-book narrative workshops at Object Book on the 6th of August. More details to follow.
My absence on the blog lately can be explained by attempting to pass my degree (haven’t yet, so posting might still be a bit sporadic). I’m starting a new series, looking at what I’m reading at the moment, which also ties into my current research interests and writing so I suppose I’ll just combine all that into one series – reading, researching and writing in one!
I’ve been researching and working on my graduate project which is titled “Is e Eire mo Bhaile”, which means “Ireland is my home”, in Irish. To that end, this post is about what I’m doing to research this project.
Books:
Rodinsky’s Room – Rachel Lichtenstein & Iain Sinclair
Lichtenstien and Sinclair take a very upbeat stance on the disappearance of David Rodinsky and trace this through the archive of ephemera left behind in his room in Whitechapel. The book traces Lichtenstien’s research of Rodinksy through writing and photography and gives a good example of a book using both photography and writing to illustrate.
The Photograph – Graham Clarke
Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma – Ulrich Baer
The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning – James Young
The Painter of Modern Life – Charles Baudelaire
On the Natural History of Destruction – WG Sebald
The Pivot of the World: Photography and it’s Nation – Blake Stimson
The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories – John Tagg
Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes Camera Lucida – Geoffery Bachen
These books deal with the photographic image as carrier of memory, the memorialisation of the journey, the journey itself, the ontology of the image and photographic archives.
Images of the final book and project itself to follow.
My current body of work is continuing my research practice into notions of identity and “Irishness” (see artist statement). As such, I’m concentrating my current body of work around Irish emigrants and second-generation Irish who live in London. This project aims to explore the theme of “home” and what this means to people who are not necessarily in a place they call home. The concepts of what and where home is will be explored through a photographic project using medium format analogue photography and transcribed interviews. I plan to document my research and process on this blog for research and my personal blog for process images.
Stay tuned for research and process images and info
My research at the start of this semester centered around surrealist collage and Gothic painting. My research has since taken a turn into looking at museological display and artifact studies. This is documented in my purpose-built research blog which can be accessed at Aisling Keavey Art Research
Joan Fontecurberta – Mind Games, British Journal of Photography, November 2014
Joan Fontecuberta constructs false narratives and false archives using photo-montage and photography. This work is particularly interesting as it displays the power that the manipulation of photography as over the audience’s perception of a work, and also questions about the validity of archives and the arching process.
British Library – Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (03-10-14 => 20-01-15)
The strongest reference I have found for my current body of work (which centers around the autobiographical, museological display and the Irish experience) is an object housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University.
The Pitt Rivers museum, founded in 1884, is a museum of anthropology and world archeology. Its collections include materials by peoples from cultures around the world and from throughout history. While the focus of the Museum is on human cultures and how different peoples have solved the problems of everyday life, the collections include human remains acquired to show some aspect of culture, such as burial customs.
The artifact that I am researching is one with the object number 1884.57.18, a human heart in a heart shaped cist.
(Click on the image to go to more information)
This object is particularly interesting as it raises questions for me about colonialism, burial practices and artifact studies.
This object, according to the Pitt Rivers website, was found in the basement of a church in county Cork, Ireland by General Pitt-Rivers on one of his expeditions to the country in the 1880s. This raises various questions about why Pitt-Rivers decided to extract this object from its current location and house it in a foreign museum; is colonialism to blame for this object and other objects being housed in British museums; do objects being housed in foreign museums help the discourse around such objects and themes to be opened up to an audience that would otherwise have not been exposed to it?
A sound file of the curator talking about this object can be found here.
I’ll be going further into these themes in subsequent posts as this research and project progresses so watch this space.
At the moment, my research centers around the autobiographical; post-colonialism, musicological display, artifact studies and the Irish experience. My next project centers around an Irish artifact found under a church in County Cork but housed in The Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford University, England.
My next post will go more in depth about this object