Philip Rainey

Ulster University

Project Statement:

I’m awake but still dreaming, stuck in this prologue to an end

Taking the form of an unfinished elegy, ‘If this is where I leave you’ is a portrait of an unseen relationship between selfhood and spirituality. Mourning the loss of a relationship that hasn’t yet ended but has become entangled in the void of here and now. When you have lost your sense of self within it, no longer able to separate the I from you within the us. Hauntology is embedded within the work by underpinning the motifs of water, light and the window, a love letter to futures lost and pasts fragmented. The strategy of image-text creates a layer of controlled yet confessional writing contrasting against the detached enigma of the imagery. Investigating love, loss and longing.

ARTIST BIO:

Philip Rainey is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Northern Ireland. Obtaining their Bachelor (Hons) Degree in Photography with Video from Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. His practice incorporates lens-based art alongside text, exploring themes of selfhood, spirituality and memory. Through a lyrical visual style which blurs the lines between the pictorial and the painterly, his work uses the camera as an equilibrium between the real and the fictitious.