Born: 1968, Dublin, Ireland
Profession: Artist and archivist
Lives and works: Dublin, Ireland
A selection of self-portraits using the Joly screen process, dating from 2018–2023. These images are based on or inspired by iconic photographs, but fuse references rather than re-enact them.
The colour process I use is analogue—a two-part photographic object that employs a striped colour screen inside the camera when shooting, which burns the colour register into black-and-white sheet film. When (reverse) processed, the screen is aligned with the B&W film to produce a colour photograph.
This was one of the first additive colour methods that worked, invented in Ireland in the 1890s, but later abandoned when the Autochrome plate was introduced, which used colour dots rather than RGB stripes.
My ambition has been to create a visual history for this process—one it never had. To do this, I have used artistic and historical references spanning over 500 years. The work presents a kind of “counterfactual temporality,” imagining a longer potential history of photography.
