Miriam O’ Connor
Tomorrow is Sunday

Following a family bereavement in 2013, O’ Connor returned home to live and work on the family farm. Tomorrow is Sunday is an on-going photographic project which engages with this unanticipated homecoming. Over the last number of years she has struggled to understand this transition through the medium of photography, using the camera and other practices of reading, writing, collecting and reflecting in a quasi-therapeutic manner to document fragments from daily life and experiences. This approach to understanding and acceptance often raised more questions than it provided answers.

O’ Connor also draws on farming diaries, notes and exchanges as a means of exploring the past and at the same time opening up new perspectives on present circumstances. These traces of everyday life have acted as the catalyst for the production of a series of logbooks which catalogue various activities characteristic of her new life. Through detailing daily farming tasks and domestic duties, compiling inventories and anecdotes, this approach of logging and indexing reflects an effort to regain some semblance of order and a means by which past and present might begin to align or reconcile in some way.

BIO

Irish photographer, Miriam O’ Connor lives and works in Cork. She holds a BA in photography from Dublin Institute of Technology, and completed a Research Masters at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire in 2011. Drawing inspiration from the language, sights and sounds of the everyday, O’ Connor’s practice frequently engages with matters which reflect her day-to-day experience of being a photographer. Her projects have explored themes around looking and seeing; the relationship between camera and subject; the circulation and consumption of images and the complex nature of photographic representation. She often employs wit and humour in her practice as tools to communicate her photographic inquiries.

Her work has been exhibited and published extensively, with features in magazines including; Camera Austria, Source, and The New York Times. Recent solo shows include Galleri Image, Denmark, The Third Space Gallery, Belfast, during ‘THERE THERE’ festival, Cork and Sternview Gallery, Cork. In January 2012, PogoBooks, Berlin and Galleri Image, Denmark published her first photo book Attention Seekers. In 2012, she received the Alliance Française Photography Award, for her project The Misbehaving Camera, which included a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. She was a nominee for the Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Photography Awards and produced her second photobook, The Legacy Project, an arts commission with The National Women’s Council of Ireland in 2013. She was one of the selected artists for Greetings from Ireland (2015) and New Irish Works I & II (2013, 2016).  In conjunction with Galleri Image, Denmark, she is currently producing new work for FRESH EYES – International artists rethink Aarhus, which will be exhibited during Aarhus Capital of Culture, 2017.
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