Robert Ellis

The Forbidden Sun

29 August – 11 October 2026

The Forbidden Sun transports the viewer into a world without clear boundaries or geographic markers, where natural and synthetic elements collide.

A major new body of work by Irish artist Robert Ellis. Using landscape imagery, the exhibition evokes the experience of growing up in an atmosphere of silence and shame where uncomfortable truths lingered beneath the surface. The exhibition takes its title from Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon, a novel Ellis first read as a teenager, drawn to its restraint and the emotional charge of what remains unsaid.

Through photography, video, and ambient sound, The Forbidden Sun transports the viewer into a world without clear boundaries or geographic markers, where natural and synthetic elements collide. Steam rises from the earth as bubbling mud and geothermal activity meet the relentless presence of industrial machinery, grinding quarried stone into sand, awaiting its final transformation into concrete. These landscapes are sites of profound tension, living and evolving spaces shaped by unseen pressures and energies.

From the series The Forbidden Sun © Robert Ellis

Drawing from personal memory, Ellis constructs a non-place that unsettles our sense of reality, while remaining deeply rooted in the experience of growing up queer and closeted in rural Ireland, where identity has to be negotiated rather than openly declared. The work offers powerful metaphors for the forces that shape attitudes, behaviour, and agency in relation to our own desires. These images often feel haunted, revealing suggestive traces of an unacknowledged sexuality, a return of the repressed.

Although set against a backdrop of shame and denial, as it unfolds, The Forbidden Sun is ultimately a narrative of emotional endurance, evoking the psychological confines of ‘the closet’ through these stark landscapes only to reject it. The work embraces the redemptive possibilities of queer desire, with Ellis boldly asking what the forbidden sun might be and how we come to fear it before ever having felt its warmth.

View of the Grey Room at Photo Museum Ireland showcasing work by Early Career Artisrt Residency Award winner Spencer Glover in Talents 2024 photography exhibition

Artist Biography

Robert Ellis is an Irish photographer and lecturer who completed his MFA in Photography from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2011), having previously graduated with a BA Hons Degree in Photography from the Dublin Institute of Photography (2007). Recent exhibitions in 2024 includes Changing States: Ireland in the 21st Century (Berlin) and Modern Nature in Cairde Arts Festival (Sligo). Solo exhibitions include Matthis Gallery (USA), RUA Red (Dublin), Belfast Exposed Gallery and Peckham 24 (Photo London). His work is held in several private collections, including the Northern Ireland Arts Council. He has been featured on a number of online platforms, including The British Journal of Photography, FlakPhoto, and This is Paper. In 2014, he was invited as an emerging European photographer to participate in Plat(t)form at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. He was commissioned by curator Valerie Connor for Golden Mountain, TULCA Visual Arts Festival. His work was featured in New Irish Works as part of the PhotoIreland Festival 2013, including the publication of the same name. He is currently a photography lecturer at Griffith College and the National College of Art & Design in Dublin.