“What was and What is” is a project inspired by the change of surroundings and the nostalgia that comes with the loss of once familar surrounds.

My current ongoing studio practise is what has resulted in the project “What was and What is”, which looks at my relationship with the spaces of the rural village of East Clare, where I grew up, and no longer reside in. I haven’t lived in the place where most of the work is depicted on a full-time basis for a significant number of years. This has made me more aware of the more dramatic and subtle changes that have occurred in my absence from living there that I witness when visiting friends and family. As time has passed, with myself not being present in the local setting of what the work depicts has made me both nostalgic and mournful of these spaces of the memories that are associated with them growing up, but not being nostalgic for the village itself, more for what is tied to the location.

The work uses a variety of photo-making processes, such as digital and darkroom photography, videography, and other miscellaneous image-making processes. Making use of photography and videography in particular for the project, for the documentary aspect of the mediums. Depicting both landscapes and domestic scenes in both my old rural home of East Clare and my current Urban home of Limerick, being a strong departure from each other.