Paddy Kelly graduated in BA (Hons) Photography, University of Ulster, Belfast in 2011. He is co-founder of Belfast Photo Factory, co-founder. Exhibitions include: Manouvers, Hereford Photographic Festival, 2011; Bogland, Gerard Dillon Gallery, Belfast, 2011; FotoWeekDC; Blank Space SE, Washington DC, 2011; “Belfast Photo Factory: One Month Book Project“; Belfast Photo Festival, Belfast Exposed, 2011. Other projects include: Artist in residence - ARCH Development Corporation (ADC), Washington DC, 2011; SOURCE Photographic Review; issue 67/Summer 2011; Artist in residence - Community Vision Project, Scariff Festival 2011, Co. Clare. His work is in the collection of Queen’s University, Belfast.

This is a new project building on the Fort Dunree programme, Darkroom Residencies contexts, and connections to the Bealtaine Festival that Artlink has been developing.

There will be a six month Artlink Darkroom Residency within which new works will be researched and produced acting as local development of the Bogland project looking at local sites; alongside a series of workshops in photography for local older people within the 2012 Belataine Festival of arts for older people in May. Artlink will build upon its recent success in engaging with older members of our local communities within the Bealtaine Festival.

The artist’s Darkroom Residency will include several open studio and workshop days.

The project will exhibit two bodies of work: Bogland an ongoing series of photographs taken in remote Irish rural locations locations that were used as IRA training camps during the 1970’s - a body of work revealing politics and history within landscape images. Signs of Life is an initimate study focusing on images of the bedrooms and bedside tables of the elderly, shot in Ireland and amongst the elderly Irish community in Washington.
Bogland examines the traces and fragments of political and emotional unrest in Northern Ireland which over time have fused and become hidden within the landscape.

Kelly’s imagery may at first appear to be simple studies of the landscape but on closer inspection they are seen to hold depth and insight into a delicate conflict. The locations captured were once used by the IRA as training camps during the 1970’s but now sit somewhere between “stasis and change”, between wanting to remember and trying to forget”.
The work also looks at the passing of history from one generation to another, from those who experienced the political conflict and unrest directly to the one’s who learn from history books. Kelly has personal motivations surrounding the work and explains that the project is an attempt to emotionally identify with his father’s experiences of ‘the troubles’.

Signs of Life focused on the tension which personal, religious and medicinal items create together in the bedrooms and bedside tables of the elderly in Ireland, and elderly Irish residents of Washington DC who have migrated from Ireland (shot during my ARCH Development Corporation (ADC), residency there). I'm looking at how the impact of transitions involving place and space can influence the idea of home and personal belief... focusing on what transformations exist here, and what remains the same, in contrast to the bedrooms and bedside tables of my own grandmothers in Ireland. I'm focusing mainly on residents who have maintained a strong sense of religion which originated in Ireland, and which they have brought with them to DC. One inspiration for the taking of the photographs is the relationship of such subjects with the home they have left, as it is tied to their relationship with the new home they have created.

Artist’s site: www.paddykelly.net