Over the summer, I was asked by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens to create a work based on the leafy square that adjoins the centre’s landmark building in south Belfast.
When the centre opened its new building in 2024, this square on Mount Charles was unveiled as ‘Marie Heaney Square,’ in honour of Seamus Heaney’s wife Marie Heaney.
The resulting work is an experimental photograph and part of a series of works for I have been working on for several years now that attempt to capture the idea and feeling of walking trough a space in a single image. In creating this work, and others like it, I walk along a pre-determined path, taking photos at regular intervals. On a long street, for example, that might mean shooting a photograph every 10 paces; for shorter trajectories, such as Marie Heaney Square, then every 2 to 5 steps.
Back in the studio, I stack all the photographs together to form a composite image – more or less like a double exposure, but rather using 50 to 100 images. The result is a journey in a single image and I am honoured that this one was presented to Marie Heaney herself. Huge thanks to the centre for commissioning me.
