Ireland
I spent 14 days taking 3,600 photographs while travelling around the coast of Ireland. I photographed a lot each day until the camera felt like a prosthetic device on my face, an extension of my body. It was like my eyes blinking except that I have a photographic digital record. The art is still in the photographic moment as I know when I have a really great photograph at the time. This is an exhausting process as I tend to shoot for long hours daily and I then end up with a lot of photographs to edit. The work load has increased exponentially by photographing digitally. My photography is slow and meticulous.
I spent months looking at and editing my Ireland photographs. This included the amazing lush green landscapes of rolling hills full of sheep, cliffs, rugged shore lines, sandy beaches, castles, and incredible architecture in ancient and pre-historic cities. This is a part of my cultural heritage. This photographic series is a merging of my artistic and academic skills as a visual arts researcher. It is similar to grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) that I use for my academic research wherein I let the field of study speak to me. I did not approach it with a preconceived idea nor did I pose a question that I needed to answer but went out daily and photographed. I let Ireland tell me what photographs needed to be taken and my photographic eye knew when to take the photograph from my years of experience as a photographer.
Each of the photographs that you will view have a story that is told visually. As I was continuously editing my photographs for months while making files in folders I asked myself: What was my experience of Ireland? How can I represent this experience so that it has the feeling of what each inspiring photograph had when I took the shot? It was a reliving and recreating of experience while working with specialty papers and creating triptychs, diptychs and other layouts to photographically tell the stories. I did more straight photography than I did in my last several series as it is what this Ireland exhibition required. The 18 limited edition colour archival quality giclée photographic prints are the result of my photographic Ireland experience.
Kathy received financial support for her Ireland exhibition at Artists on Elgin, Sudbury, Ontario from Laurentian University (publication/exhibition).
Please see the following URLs for Kathy’s videos and other websites:
https://laurentian.ca/videos-visual-artists-greater-sudbury
