12/04/2025
My works in the super new IOVA photography collective show in GalleryX in Hume St., Dublin.
They're two composite works, presented as prints in customised frames.
The photos I took actually over the last 20 years possibly; had on my old old website but never made prints from. So this was a lovely opportunity with the suggestive title: LUCID DREAMS.
I always carry a camera and have at different times been occasionally shooting for different projects as I feel like it and opportunities offer themselves.
For a long time I was compelled to photograph the amazing appalling spectacle of broken umbrellas on the streets of Dublin; after a particularly windy and wet day the streets would be strewn with cheap broken umbrellas which I couldn't resist photographing; and after years of it I noticed how charming it was to see people clutching collapsing or partly stricken umbrellas too. I would be in pouring rain with a €3000 DSLR in a plastic pouch and stopping people saying "I'm an artist and one of my projects is people with broken umbrellas and yours is PARTICULARLY BEAUTIFUL" and they would sometimes laugh, and hopefully wait long enough for me to sn**ch a photo or two. Interestingly men would less often have them and much less often want to stop & be photographed, to the extent that my girlfriend at the time claimed I only stopped beautiful young women but that was just what happened! And I also photographed many many vandalised bicycles; I eventually titled them BICYKILLS and after a series were used in a TV documentary the local Corporation decided to remove them from the streets, so you see them much less nowadays. One of the things I also noticed was sadly abandoned single wheels, sometimes the wheel was twisted in a way I could photograph like an infinity symbol...
To successfully present them like this in a grid I had to use a black background and make a custom frame, hand-painting the matte and slip inside. I hope you enjoy and might check out the show. They're for sale too, check out the show or DM me; they're an open print edition to keep the price down and I think I'll make them available through JamArtFactory too...
Final pic; my friend Ishmael and Jana Bulochova who co-curated the show with the group.
Continues until 27th April.
