This Must Be The Place
Where the fringes of the new suburbs wash up against the shoreline of the countryside, space has its own character. The city has spread out like a tide, steadily, inexorably, and in its most recent surge has created these perimeter zones, fuelled by property development, financial speculation and great but unfulfilled promise. The suburbs can be complicated and varied places. Against the backdrop of the still visible fallout of the Celtic Tiger collapse, the project has been a personal mapping of the place from the perspective of someone who has spent a lifetime living and working in and around these spaces.
The suburbs have always been an aspect of Dublin expanding ever outwards as people migrate from the city by compulsion or expulsion. Topography, economics, politics, urban planning, fashion and persona have played their parts in this development and the desirability of these suburbs. This project is part memoir, part history and part survey of the old and new suburbs on the northern perimeter of Dublin City. Drawing from family photographs and artefacts, photographs from the post Celtic Tiger period and new work in lockdown and after, a multi-layered work has evolved. Change and stasis, growth and stagnation are reflected in the landscape. The strata of history break the surface here and there, so that the old sits alongside the new in an uneasy truce as an uncertain future unfolds.
The journeying back and forth to photograph, or not photograph, is its own ritual with litanies of repetition, familiarity and a kind of meditative boredom, like all rituals. The same things are seen over and over, the barriers, the empty places, the signs, the weight of history, the inevitability of change and the persistence of nature. Within all that sameness, however, there are the subtle differences which bring relief and tiny pleasures, suggesting that this is a thing worth doing, and the endless collecting might have some purpose. Covid, too, became a personal element of the project which was carried out within the travel limits, leading to the realisation that I have lived and worked inside a 5 km radius for almost 60 years, a certain kind of confinement, not necessarily oppressive, but one which has heightened the awareness of the intimate and the local.