At Mirrored River

Made over several years in the small industrial town where I grew up, At Mirrored River was my first sustained exploration of making a body of work within a single place. I wanted to give myself the freedom to follow my own instincts, looking closely at the ordinary spaces and lives around me, and finding beauty, possibility and meaning in the familiar.

Photographed on 5x4, the work developed through a process of quiet observation. I made a conscious decision to use the same quality of light throughout, wanting the photographs to feel as though they could have been made in a single day. Yet the subtle changes of the seasons reveal the passing of time. For me, these shifts reflected the inner lives of the people I photographed, and my own experience of the changing thoughts, feelings and uncertainties we navigate every day.

The work was inspired by the Gaelic word teannalach, an awareness of what is intangible and hushed: the quiet presence of people, places and nature. As the work developed, it became less about describing a particular town and more about the feelings and stories held within it. The portraits, landscapes and everyday spaces became fragments of a larger, unfolding narrative, reflecting the questions we ask ourselves, the dreams we carry and the possibilities we imagine.

Although rooted in one particular place, At Mirrored River seeks to capture something more universal: the beauty and complexity of ordinary lives, and the shifting emotional landscape that exists within us all. As The Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne observed, the work is one in which “the ordinary is leavened with the extraordinary.”