Untitled / RHA@Pluck/ ‘From Pride in Diversity to Standing Fast: Exhibiting Queer Culture in OUTART 1996-2001’/ Dublin 2022 and 1997/ Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, Ireland 1991.
This series from 1992 was produced over two years after I moved to London to undertake my master’s degree at Chelsea College of Art. Working with medium-format cameras here, the project emerged during a politically tense period when IRA bombings targeted the financial district of London, creating an atmosphere of instability, surveillance, and unease throughout the city. Against this backdrop, the work developed as an intensely personal exploration of queer identity, sexuality, desire, and the body within both public and clandestine urban spaces. As a gay Irish man arriving in London at this moment, I carried with me both the repression of Catholic Ireland and the urgency of living through the AIDS crisis. I was determined that fear, politics, or social hostility would not limit my creative or personal freedom. The city itself became a site of investigation and possibility, allowing me to construct a photographic language rooted in bodily experience rather than conventional narrative.
The photographs move through a range of locations associated with visibility, secrecy, and erotic encounter: the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dublin’s Botanical gardens, public swimming pools, shower rooms, toilets used for cottaging, cruising grounds in graveyards and gay nightclubs. Within these environments, fragments of my own body were juxtaposed with architectural details, polished taps and mechanical fittings, marble museum sculptures, organic plant forms, and bodily fluids. The resulting compositions created charged visual relationships between flesh, stone, metal, water and space.
The works attempted to construct a visual language beyond the limitations of written text, shaped in part by my experience of dyslexia. Rather than relying on direct explanation, meaning emerged through association, fragmentation, sensuality, and atmosphere. The images explored the dangerous pleasures of existing between public and private experience, exposure and concealment, fantasy and memory during the height of AIDS, when queer intimacy was frequently shadowed by fear, stigma and loss.
My large-scale sculptural kinetic installation led to my receiving the Barclays Young Artist of the Year Award 1992 and inclusion in a group exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The recognition marked a significant turning point, affirming that others believed in the value and urgency of the work and its unapologetic engagement with queer experience.
