Saturday, October 7 2023, 18:00
The Annex Central Plaza, Dame Street, D02 A3X7
Tickets on Eventbrite
AAI Conversations
The AAI are delighted to present a discussion with members of the Irish Architectural Photographers Group.
Please join Aisling McCoy, Alice Clancy, Fionn McCann, Shane Lynam and Ste Murray for their first group event; as they each present examples of their work and the ideas, motivations, and processes behind them.
Aisling McCoy
Aisling is a visual artist photo editor and photographer and her work explores how we inhabit and imagine place. Her background as an architect very much influences how she sees world and her practice is situated in the overlap between the two disciplines of architecture and photography. She sees them as twinned practices that reinforce and affect each other. Architecture is the translation of a concept, usually through images, into a physical form; while photography works on the reverse, by translating an existing space into an image. Both negotiate a balance between the real and the ideal, and they each influence how we inhabit – how we make place, and how we construct meaning.
Alice Clancy
Alice Clancy is an architectural practitioner whose practice involves education, curation and photography. Collaboration is at the heart of all aspects of her practice.
Alice works part-time as an Assistant Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Architecture, Planning & Environmental Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is a key member of the UCD Building Change Team, a HEA/HCI initiative and a collaboration between all six schools of architecture in Ireland to transform the architectural undergraduate curriculum to address the challenges of the climate and housing crises. She has won teaching awards and taught, lectured and reviewed at schools of architecture and design across Ireland and the UK. In 2023 she was a key development consultant and contributor to the first ever Biennale College Architettura in Venice, working as part of a cohort of 15 international academics and 50 emerging architectural practitioners, early stage academics and graduate students to explore how to place decolonisation and decarbonisation at the heart of architectural education.
Her curatorial work includes an unprecedented two appointments to the Curatorial team for La Biennale Architettura in Venice: In 2018 as Assistant to the Curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara for FREESPACE, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition and in 2023 as as Assistant to Curator Lesley Lokko for the Laboratory of the Future, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, working as Curatorial Team lead on the Curator’s Special Projects and the Biennale College Architettura.
In her photographic practice, she focuses on the careful and considered visual communication of built space, working with designers and building inhabitants to explore and understand how light and the inhabitation of the project animate and ultimately transform each project from space to place. Her work has been widely published.
Fionn McCann
I have always been drawn to the form, shape and geometry of buildings, landscape and people. The exploration of these elements within the frame and the necessary subtraction, addition or alterations have always been the magic of photography for me. Composed with either natural or artificial light, the approach could be described as slow documentary.
Over the last number of years I have become increasingly interested in the impact man leaves on the environment be it unintentional or otherwise. Having photographed quarries, landscapes, industrial spaces and the people who inhabit them, I feel honored to have seen behind the curtain of an otherwise veiled world.
Born in Dublin I left a career in Archaeology to begin a new life as a photographer. An early love of the Sunday Papers magazines with stories from around the world captured my imagination. After courses in the Gallery of Photography I landed an assisting job with one of Ireland’s leading Photographers. Since then my work has taken me to many places around the world and I have been awarded Arts Council Grants for personal projects, multiple Bursary awards, and have been shortlisted for the Zurich Portrait prize on a few occasions. My work has been purchased by The National Gallery of Ireland and other Public Institutions. I live in Dublin with my wife, two children and a dog called Henry.
Shane Lynam
Shane Lynam is an Irish photographer based in Dublin. He completed an MA in European Studies at KU Leuven in 2006 and an MA in Documentary Photography at University of Wales in 2012. His first book, Fifty High Seasons, was published in 2018. Shane was the recipient of the Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary Award in 2022, the Curtin O’Donoghue RHA award in 2018 and the Photo Museum Ireland Solas Award in 2015. In 2019, he was selected for a residency at the Irish Cultural Center in Paris, where he worked on Contours, an ongoing project about parks in the banlieue of Paris. Alongside his art practice, Shane teaches photography at TU Dublin and works with architectural and editorial clients. Shane is currently Artist in Residence at Photo Museum Ireland, where he is working towards printing and exhibiting a new body of work titled Pebbledash Wonderland in September 2024.
Portrait by Conor Horgan
Ste Murray
Ste is a photographer and actor from Dublin. He primarily works with architects, theatre makers, and arts organisations; interpreting and (re)presenting their work. He enjoys the various conditions & challenges these areas have to offer. He is particularly interested in the changing spatial qualities of the world around us, patterns & habits of societies, and the transience of time. Parallel to his commissions, he works on personal projects and exhibitions.
Portrait by Liadh Connolly