Paddy Kelly’s photographs are taken in locations that were used as IRA training camps
during the 1970’s. There is a political and emotional ambivalence to what at first
seem to be natural landscapes as they exist today, but which have fragments and
traces hidden beneath the visible surface, disappearing from the landmark yet still
flowing through the collective memory — surviving on a latent, unseen level
somewhere between stasis and change… between wanting to remember and trying
to forget.
This work looks at how a political situation can fuse with a physical landscape and
asks to what depth it can tell us about past and present human experience. In doing
so it reveals aspects of the social and political context of Northern Ireland, of
intimacy and unease and of the highest and lowest peaks in the spectrum of human
experience. It asks how an external environment can affect inner states of
consciousness and how history can manifest and conceal itself within a place.
This project is an attempt to express and explore how feelings and personal
experience can be communicated, to emotionally identify with my father and to
connect on a different level. The work addresses identity, memory and place and
asks how history is handed down from generation to generation, contrasting the
“objective truth” of the photograph with the oral tradition of storytelling — times
and places become merged together with fragments of truth and multiple truths
existing in one situation.
Biography
Paddy Kelly is a Northern Irish artist. He graduated with a BA (Hons) from Ulster University. His
work attempts to express and explore how thought, feeling and individual experience can be
communicated and distilled through the photograph. He is interested in situations that are
intrinsically human and which have elements of both the higher and lower aspects of human
experience; in particular the borders between the two. He has exhibited widely and his clients include
Magnum Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies and Wallpaper* Magazine.