Royal Hibernian Academy Main Gallery, Sep – Dec 2025

Conor Horgan __ Jialin Long __ Shane Lynam __ Eimear Lynch __ Fionn McCann __ Jan McCullough __ Malcolm McGettigan __ Yvette Monahan __ Kate Nolan __ Clodagh O’Leary __ Ciara Richardson __ Daragh Soden __ Brían Sparks __ Pádraig Spillane __ Izabela Szczutkowska __ Agata Stoinska __ Ruby Wallis

A R C H I P E L A G O is the first survey exhibition of Irish fine art photographic practice in the RHA.  It features seventeen intergenerational artists, whose practice spans a myriad of subjects that concern lens-based culture in this country.  The form of photographic practice has expanded in recent times and artists were invited to play to the spatial magnitude of the Gallagher Gallery.  As well as responding to open spaces with in-the-round pieces, many used height to their full advantage in elevated installations to create something beyond the typical photo show.

DM

From Ken Grant’s essay:

When the cartographer Tim Robinson moved to the Aran Islands in late 1972, he brought with him a life of draughtsmanship and plans to make maps and write. Once there, he might have noticed others drawn to that small archipelago: visitors, passing through hoping to find the distillation of a wider Ireland; engineers preparing for electrification, archivists gathering histories, and even those who’d brought themselves far enough from the crosscurrents of home for their lives to briefly quieten. Once settled, Robinson began an interpretation as humane as it was scholarly. If Ireland was an island at the edge of Europe, he suggested, he’d arrived at a place somewhere beyond that edge and, to understand what he felt, a new map was needed.

The work gathered for A R C H I P E L A G O provides a new starting point too – one, if not of place, then of ideas and preoccupations compelled by a country redefining itself by a gradual distancing from the governance that once led and bound it. Photography in Ireland continues to evolve. For some, the wilful slowing of processes serves to counter an age of speed and precarity. For others, it can forge collaboration amongst strangers, take us to the heart of the home, or broaden, to question the temperament of an entire nation, rethink priorities and propose alternatives… MORE