Frédéric Bellay
Amy Chang
Mark Curran
Corinne Vionnet




coming soon



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These images were made during visits to the west of Ireland. My father was born there and my great-grandfather was a large landholder and Royal Magistrate when Ireland was part of the British Empire. The series began as a personal response to this landscape using the poetic, fragmented possibilities of photography to explore ‘the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath (its) surface’ (Schama) combined with my own notions of ‘home’ as a ‘fictional construct’ (Morley). The West was idyllised by the cause for Irish Nationalism embodying and representing all what the colonialist and industrialised Britain was not.

The work constructs therefore, an identity which in many ways is fictional, contrived and based in romantic nostalgia – motivated/influenced/clouded by many years living abroad as an economic migrant, reflecting upon those barriers to making sense of one’s own identity and past and what impinges and obscures – close but never quite there. Perhaps that is its link with the mythical west of nationalist Ireland.

The title of the series refers to An Górta Mhór, the Irish for The Great Hunger which is the name given to the trauma of the great famine of the mid-Nineteeth century. As a result of the wilful neglect on the part of the then administration, the island of Ireland lost, through both starvation and migration, half it’s then population of 8 million inhabitants – 2 million people died and another 2 million migrated. Today the population remains under 4 million. The West was particularly devastated.

There are no known photographs of An Górta Mhór.

This series remains a work in progress.

Mark Curran (b. 1964) lives and works in Berlin and Dublin. He is a PhD candidate through the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (CTMP), DIT and an Associate Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Photography programme at IADT-DL in Dublin. He lived in Canada for eight years, where he received a BA (Hons) in Sociology and subsequently worked as a social worker. Curran's project, Southern Cross (Gallery of Photography 2002), was published and exhibited internationally. The Breathing Factory (Edition Braus/Belfast Exposed Photography 2006), an outcome of his present postgraduate research, has been widely presented and was a finalist for the CEDEFOP PhotoMuseum Award 2007 at the Museum of Photography, Thessalonika, Greece and most recently as part of the programme of Fotofestiwal 2009 in Lodz, Poland. In early 2010, it will be presented as a solo installation at the Museum of Art, DePaul University in Chicago. Curran has also presented widely on his practice and will speak at the College Arts Association (CAA) annual conference also in Chicago in 2010. He is the recipient of an inaugural New Work Visual Arts Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland towards his present research project, one sited in a declining industrialised region of the former East Germany.