Island Talk 7
1st November 2023
Talk 1 - Philip Arneill
Philip Arneill is a Belfast-born photographer, writer, researcher and co-creator of the ‘Tokyo Jazz Joints’ audio-visual documentary project. Philip’s writing and photographic practice explore the illusory ideas of home and culture by examining insider-outsider dynamics and autoethnographic issues of place and identity, combining images with autofiction and nonfiction text.
Philip presented his Tokyo Jazz Joints project, which documents the unique world of Japan’s jazz kissa – dedicated jazz listening spaces. The environment of these spaces is a pseudo-religious one, replete with its own ritual, protocol and iconography. Their continued existence depends on the fervour and commitment of the owners and dwindling customer base who keep the faith in an era of changing tastes, digitisation and relentless urban gentrification.
Talk 2 - Sarah McAuliffe
Formerly a Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Ireland, where she was responsible for several major photography exhibitions, Sarah is currently Curator at the Royal Hibernian Academy.
She discussed her time building a photography collection at the NGI and how she is hoping to carve out more space for photography at the RHA. She explored collecting and exhibiting photography in Ireland more broadly and welcomed feedback from those attending in this area in the hope of shaping future programming at the RHA and further afield.
Talk 3 - Amelia Stein
Amelia Stein is a photographer, whose black and white photographs pursue character and the constituent elements that create them. Absence and the passage of time are recurring themes.
She presented work from her ongoing project, ISLAND.
This project is based on Iniskeagh North, situated off the Mullett Peninsula, North Mayo Coast, Ireland. The North Island along with the South Island were abandoned after significant numbers of fisherman were drowned in the Storm of October 27th, 1927. The self supporting lifestyle of the Islanders became no longer viable and the last inhabitants were evacuated from the islands in 1932. Traces of the lives lived, former homes and buildings are now subject to time and the North Atlantic storms. This body of work records the vistas through doors and windows of the now long departed occupants homes, the boundary wall of fields under cultivation. Their lives now marked by stones, the remnants of the built environment from the times of the last settlement and from previous early Christian, Pre-Christian and Earlier Settlements.
