Artist and photographer Gareth McConnell (b. 1972) grew up in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, a period spanning the late 1960s to the late 1990s, when everyday life was shaped by tension, fear and conflict. This experience, alongside his involvement in the 1990s rave generation, continues to inform his work, which occupies a distinctive space between documentary and abstraction. Through photography and film, McConnell examines the ways in which images shape our understanding of history. It’s an approach that has garnered acclaim, being published in Creative Review, Dazed, Frieze, The New York Times and The Guardian, and featured in major survey exhibitions including Observers: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930s to Now and The Portrait of Northern Ireland: Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto.
An Illusion is a new exhibition of McConnell’s work opening at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh. It includes the first gallery presentation of Details of Sectarian Murals – a series of abstract images made in Northern Ireland between 1997 and 1999, as peace talks involving Unionist and Nationalist political parties dominated the news. During this period, the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 marked a historic turning point in the three decades of conflict, establishing a framework for peace. Yet it also left many underlying divisions unresolved. McConnell takes the signs and symbols of the time – flags, weapons and declarations of allegiance – and brings them into extreme close-up, breaking their intended meaning into a constellation of colour, texture and movement. By stripping these messages of their immediate political context, he established a visual approach which has recurred in different ways ever since.
McConnell’s interest in the visual language of conflict extends beyond Northern Ireland. Also included in the show is The Stop – a recent re-working of photographs made in London during the mass demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq in February 2003. McConnell intertwines redacted archival images of young demonstrators – bearing messages of “make love not war” and “stop the war”, their eyes covered with white rectangles – with more recent flower still lifes. Flora plays a central role in McConnell’s overall body of work, often acting as a memento mori – a reminder of the inevitability of death. Here, they evoke the transience of youth, as well as the fragility and unreliability of moments captured by the camera.
For an entire generation of youth in the North of Ireland, the lived experience of The Troubles overlapped with the dancefloors of the rave era. Rave culture offered a shared space in which people from different communities could come together, challenging the sectarian divisions that shaped everyday life. The scene continues to inform McConnell’s practice, reflected in his use of saturated hues, light and movement. In dialogue with the photographs, a new moving-image and sound work will premiere at Stills. It reconfigures text and images from McConnell’s 30-year archive and is accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack by Smagghe & Cross, a music duo comprising a DJ and a classically trained composer.
Across the exhibition, McConnell returns to moments when political conflict, collective action and the experiences of youth intersect. From the symbols of sectarian allegiance in Northern Ireland to demonstrations against the Iraq War, he reconsiders how history is recorded and remembered. The influence of rave culture recalls a generation whose shared experiences of music and dance challenged the divisions that shaped their lives. Bringing these strands together, An Illusion transforms fragments of lived experience into images that resist fixed definitions, opening up new ways of looking at the past.
Gareth McConnell: An Illusion is at Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh, from 20 November – 27 February.
Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. Gareth McConnell, Ab 1 (still).
2. Gareth McConnell, The Stop, untitled (02), (2003-2024).
3. Gareth McConnell, The Stop, untitled (03), (2003-2024).
4. Gareth McConnell, The Stop, untitled (01), (2003-2024).
5. Gareth McConnell, Butterfly Bush I, (2023).
6. Gareth McConnell, The Stop, untitled (04), (2003-2024).
7. Gareth McConnell, Siobhan Ibiza (2011) (still).
