Mise en Abyme & You Mustn't Go Looking Bundle (Pre-order, Special Price)

'Mise en Abyme'

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the Irish premiere of Sharon Murphy’s new body of work 'Mise en Abyme', which focuses on Parisian carousels and theatrical décor during moments of stillness and silence. Drawing on her background in theatre and informed by concepts from psychoanalysis and magic realism in literature, this new work highlights Murphy’s longstanding interest in staged spaces and the performative in photography. 

In Western art history, ‘mise en abyme’ is the technique of placing a copy of an image within itself. Murphy uses this concept as a metaphor to investigate the boundaries between real and fictive spaces, concentrating on recurring motifs of theatre curtains, outdoor carousels, circus tents, performative sites, city parks and empty stages. 

These scenes become the point of departure for a wider exploration of the tension between hidden and revealed, negative and positive, illusion and disillusion. This work addresses the essential nature of photographic seeing, performance, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny where the familiar becomes suddenly strange and disconcerting through a play between presence and absence, evoking both enchantment and a pang of unease. 

This series marks a significant evolution in Murphy’s practice both conceptually and in terms of using the materiality of the photographic images, with an emphasis on the sculptural presence of the work, blurring the boundaries between real and represented space. The worlds implied or symbolised are both actual and potential, characterised by a capacity to juxtapose several spaces and instances of time and experience within one tangible space and where tropes of the 'mise en abyme' – doubleness, reflexivity, repetition, mirroring – play out.

'You Mustn't Go Looking'

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the first solo Irish exhibition of Emma Spreadborough’s 'You Mustn’t Go Looking,' an imaginative body of work that draws on the remnants of ancient tradition to address contemporary experience in Northern Ireland. Spreadborough takes inspiration from the writing of Brian Friel and his concern for the magical past in Ireland’s present-day culture. Friel’s play, 'Dancing at Lughnasa', explores Ireland’s mix of religion and politics and how these factors play out within the home. Using interior, domestic spaces as an analogy for safety, structure, and control, where, beyond the relative safety of the home, the landscape is regarded as dangerous and Pagan. 

Spreadborough’s work explores a similar tension in her own upbringing through the evocation of the supernatural in Northern Ireland’s mythical landscape. Staged and performative scenes suggest a haunted realm of possibility within the everyday, with echoes of half-forgotten folk customs and children’s games, that reflect a wider search for meaning and connection. The forensic, seemingly objective style of these images is undercut by the dream-like, theatrical quality of the scenes being shown, blurring the line between fiction and reality. These enigmatic rituals bring the threatening, chaotic elements of the outside world into the home, which becomes a place to act out and conquer fears.   

In 'You Mustn’t Go Looking,' Speadborough uses metaphor to address issues of place, belonging and cultural memory. The work also reflects current uncertainty and unease arising from recent seismic shifts in the socio-political landscape of the north of Ireland. A recent census in Northern Ireland revealed that for the first time since the establishment of the state, there are more people from a Catholic background in Northern Ireland than Protestants. The landscape is shown as a domain of opposing forces – past and present, tradition and change – that underlies everyday reality, breaking through the surface to make unexpected connections with contemporary life.