GRAHAM MURRELL - COUNTY MAYO AT FEN DITTON GALLERY

Portacloy Harbour

With resilience that puts other galleries in the shade, Fen Ditton Gallery presses on regardless of everything, with its Photography Festival. Already it’s been fabulous ; the inspring work of Paul Hart in the Fens, the risqué romps of the 70s by the snappers of the day, and now another award-wiinning photographer, already celebrated at Kettles Yard and beyond and is, no less, Head of Photograhy at the Central St. Martin’s College of Art In London.

Portarim

Look at these images once and they intrigue. Have a closer stare at them and you are drawn into a spare strange world , a long way from the bosky scenery of Normal People, and into a stark almost brutal reality with a beauty that has nothing to do with picture post card prettiness and everything to do with an artist’s bleak look at a land tht has seenn its fair share of suffering. My own family is from there. As much as there is the wonderful Atlantic seascape and tne cliffs and moors above it, there is an underlay of almost unimaginable loss. Connaught or Hell was where the insouciant Cromwell sent the dispossessed Irish landowners of the fertile plains of Ulster. Here is was that the evictions from homesteads hit hardest and the Great Famine bit deepest.

Graham Murrell has stripped down the scene to its basics “I am interested in the least amount of information that will result in pictures that are about ‘place’ rather than descriptive of it in the conventional sense.”

Gazing for a last time at these photographs it is hard to escape the beauty and the terror within them.

Portacloy Bay

All photographs are handprinted and framed by Graham Murrell. Image sizes 225 x 225mm, framed size 425mm x 425mm. Please select an image to view full details and enquiries can be made to info@fendittongallery.com

Towards Ballycastle