My name is Ayla Hunt, I’m a photographer and filmmaker from West Cork, soon to graduate from Munster Technological University with a BA Honours in Photography with New Media. My passion for photography lies in the infinite stories and worlds that you can both create and express through the medium.
As a child, the environment I grew up in really embraced creativity. My father shared his love for music and poetry, and my mother, being a play-school teacher, really encouraged all of my artistic endeavours. I find I have always been a highly visual individual, I studied art all through secondary school and found a sense of true freedom through my vivid imagination.
As part of my university work placement I spent three months as an in-house photographer for the Crawford College of Art and Design. During my time there I worked closely with final year Fine Art and Contemporary Applied Art students, taking professional images of their artworks. This period gave me the space to delve into so many different ideas and practices as I was surrounded by aspiring artists, each with their own mediums and stories to tell.
Currently, I am working part-time as a waitress in Dede at The Customs House. This is a Turkish cuisine, two star Michelin restaurant in the coastal village of Baltimore, West Cork. I also work as a photographer for the restaurant. Working here for the last couple of years, I have had the opportunity to grow not only as a photographer, but as a creative in general. It is an environment structured off of incredible passion and teamwork, with a dedication to the tiniest of details and artistic expressions. I believe my final year project was heavily inspired by my time working here.
I am fascinated by the uniqueness and individuality of a person and their lifetime. The idea that we are all living on this planet alongside each other, and in many ways, sharing common ground, yet our personal experiences, outcomes and takeaways of life largely differ from each other. This is what I touched upon in my final year project, “Food for Thought”. I would like to further explore this concept, however maybe with the inclusion of physical people. To continue creating worlds and stories that are physically restrained by four walls, yet open to infinite directions. It intrigues me that a frame can hold so many possibilities and offer both shared and unique experiences to an audience.
I have always loved storytelling and creative collaboration, and I find photography to be the ideal medium to connect with others while continuously exploring new concepts and immersing oneself into different worlds and stories every day.
Food for Thought
My graduate project, Food for Thought, is a series of photographs of food, captured ‘cinematically’, each representing different curated identities and worlds.
I am fascinated by both the cultural, and personal, associations food has in all of our societies. Although varying in quality and availability, food is something every person across the world has in common, with the difference being our habits and relationships with it.
This photographic project explores this connection between food and identity through the use of set design, composition and storytelling. Each scene holds a narrative that connects different foods to a person, implying that what, and the way we eat, are small reflections of our individual personalities or lifestyles.