Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Simon Meagher 

BA [Hons] Photography

I am a photographer and mixed-media artist based in Dublin, Ireland. During my time spent pursuing a BA in Photography in the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, I produced a number of photobooks including 0 (2019), and Hard-Boiled Wonderland (2020). In 2019, I spent a number of months photographing Ireland’s National Maternity Hospital culminating in a group exhibition in The Copper House Gallery. My work interrogates the allegorical and evocative potential of the photographic image through the reframing and recontextualising of quotidian phenomena. My practise aims to visually articulate the imaginary, the sentimental and the absurd.

The Clearance

The Clearance is a project which emerged through the process of clearing out the former family home, following the death of my grandfather. This work reflects on the absurdity and at times emotionally-charged nature of this process.

When the memory of the departed takes the shape of their former possessions, these possessions become tinged with an obscure sentimentality. An abstracted significance. A surrogate of sorts for the departed. My grandfather’s soul somehow living on in the drill bits still neatly arranged on the shelves of his workshop.

Using a mix of personal and archival images, The Clearance functions in part as a fictional reimagining of the life of the family patriarch. A failed attempt to piece together the whole of a man who is no longer present, from what is left behind. Ultimately, The Clearance represents the mundane, obligatory procedures of the grieving process, through the eyes of the grieving.