Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Ciara Lawless 

BA [Hons] Art

In Ciara's practice, she works with both photography and video. Her work mainly revolves around the topic of the self, she draws on experiences from her life and creates work based on her internal response. She prefers to create photographs in her practice as she loves photography and having complete creative control over what she depicts. Lighting is an important element to which she gives careful consideration. Her work usually consists of harsh lighting to achieve stark contrasts which she finds enhances the emotions that she tries to convey and she feels the medium of photography lends itself toward the dramatic.

Project Description

My Project is about Dissociative Identity Disorder, a condition where a single person develops multiple personalities as a response to traumatic events they have experienced. Someone who is very close to me was recently diagnosed with D.I.D and it changed many aspects of my life. I chose to create work about this condition as a response to how I am personally dealing with having to help someone who has it. In this work, I will be using myself to show this disorder however I am only responding to it from my perspective - purely as an observer - which is different from experiencing it firsthand. This piece is a means to show how I perceive it and what I have learned up to this point. This work is a visual response to my reality.



The importance of the alter ego in the work of Cindy Sherman and Grayson Perry

An alter ego is the second version of oneself that can be seen or shown in a variety of different ways. Many artists use a mask in their work, such as Cindy Sherman, whose work is created from her wearing many different masks. My thesis investigates why there is a need to use a mask within the art industry and why they chose to alter or distort their own image to create this mask. The psychology behind the idea of the alter ego is aslo investigated in order to gain an understanding of the masks the artist Cindy Sherman and Grayson Perry choose to use.