Island Talk 1
27th January 2023
Talk 1 - Yvette Monahan
Monahan presented ‘This unending story’, a meditation on the nature of resonance and consciousness. The birth of her daughter was the cosmic catalyst that prompted research into the oscillating forces from small and large moments of creation.
Building on research from Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Ursula Le Guin, Minor White, Octopuses, cosmic expansion, evolutionary biology, and spiritual midwifery, the images and drawings explore the imprints and echoes of creation through space, soundwaves, ancestry, and Octopuses.
Talk 2 - Aisling McCoy
Aisling McCoy is an Irish visual artist working with photography and whose work explores how we inhabit and imagine place. Her background as an architect very much influences how she sees the world, and her practice is situated in the overlap between these two disciplines of space-making and image-making.
Aisling presented a work in progress based on her project “Studies in Time and Distance” which has evolved from a project started during the covid-19 lockdown, to a multidisciplinary research project which reflects on the processes of design and of building alongside the changing nature of home and inhabitation.
www.aislingmccoy.com
Talk 3 - Conor Horgan
Conor Horgan is a photographer and visual artist, best known for his portraiture, who also works as a filmmaker and writer.
He gave a presentation on the topic of portraiture, paying particular attention to the moments of intimacy, connection and trust that ideally take place between the photographer and subject. Other aspects of portraiture touched on were the difference between a headshot and a portrait and the subject’s desire to be flattered.
His talk was illustrated with the stories behind some iconic portraits by Avedon, Penn and others. He also shared details of what happened behind the scenes of some portraits from his own practice, and finished with the observation that the more open, authentic and vulnerable the photographer can be, the more likely it is that the subject will respond in kind and that some kind of truth about them will be revealed.
