Clare Gallagher is a Northern Irish artist whose work focuses on the ordinary, everyday experiences of home. A photography lecturer since 2003, she teaches on the BA, MFA and PhD programmes at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. Clare is also an academic researcher and completed a PhD using photography and video to research the hidden work of home and family. She is currently writing a book, A Woman’s Work: Home as Personal and Political. More of her research can be found here.

Clare’s practice centres on themes of home and care, primarily using photography. Her previous projects have focused on overlooked elements of domestic life, seeking value in the daily work of mothering and home, and challenging perceptions of home life as leisured, insignificant and safe. In The Second Shift she looked at the invisible work of home and childcare primarily carried out by women on top of their paid employment. The series was published as a photobook which was named as one of The Guardian’s top 15 photobooks of the year, incorporating a quietly angry poem by Leontia Flynn, and using cropping and layering to destabilise and denaturalise notions of home.

Her work-in-progress Touch/Hunger turns towards the attachments and tensions in relationships of and with the home, the performance of care, as well as invisible mental and emotional labour. It explores the contradictions of intimacy and claustrophobia situated there, and maternal anxiety about loss or separation at the same time as the increasing detachment of teenagers.