Ciarán óg arnold - Development Residency Artist 2025-2025
This new project by Ciarán Óg Arnold has been made in close proximity to home, often concentrating on domestic interiors and night-time landscapes. The subject matter reflects his changed circumstances as a parent. Employing Arnold’s signature dark, subjective style, these pictures also have a sense of constraint and an element of fairy-tale menace, as if seeing the world through the eyes of his children. This is in keeping with the tension that ran through Arnold’s previous work, but also introduces a dimension of black humour and the surreal. These pictures question familiar, idealised representations of domesticity, which is shown here as something complex and uncertain, rather than a place of safety and comfort.
Artist biography:
Ciarán Óg Arnold (b. 1977) is an MFA photography graduate from University of Ulster. Arnold is the first Irish photographer to have won the prestigious international MACK First Book Award in 2015 for his series I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed, but all I could do was get drunk again. His work was exhibited in Midlands - Photographs from the Interior group exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland (formerly Gallery of Photography Ireland) surveying the interior landscape of Ireland in 2008. He was shortlisted for the Photo Museum Ireland / Source Magazine Solas International Photography Prize and international touring exhibition. His artist book received extensive international acclaim and was widely featured to critical acclaim in the press worldwide in 2015. Arnold has recently exhibited at Seen 15 Gallery during Photo London, and Les Rencontres d’Arles, France. In 2023 he was awarded the inaugural Development Residency to support his new body of work Man Among the Ruins, which premiered in our exhibition No Place Like Home: The Domestic in Irish Photography (2023).
Ciarán Óg Arnold, Man Among the Ruins, as part of our exhibition No Place Like Home: The Domestic in Irish Photography (2023)