Silent City featuring photographs from the Settlement series.
13 April – 21 July 2024
Print Gallery | Admission free
Exploring quiet urban landscapes, Silent City features photography, paintings, prints and drawings from the Gallery’s permanent collection. New acquisitions and works that have not yet been displayed in public will be highlighted.
Curator: Dara McElligot
Settlement 2011
All the photographs in this series are produced between sunset and sunrise, partly to avoid any potential confrontation with security guards who regularly patrol these sites during the daytime. The combination of darkness, artificial light and long exposures draws attention to the effects of development on the natural environment by reducing each photograph to the key elements of land and manmade constructions. The natural landscape has been disturbed by earth moving machinery generating artificial hills and valleys in front of half built or unoccupied dwellings. Slowly, nature has started to reclaim the exposed landscape. With the collapse of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, more than fifteen years of growth suddenly ended. The banks foreclosed on developer’s loans, all building projects across the state ceased. This resulted in ‘ghost estates’ and unfinished ‘one off houses’.