Samuel Laurence Cunnane works with analogue photography, capturing places, people and plants with a detached "floating eye" perspective. Whether in Guangzhou, Tehran, the Balkans, or his native Kerry, Cunnane is drawn to the unnoticed periphery: the outskirts of the city, where plants battle with concrete; the edges of housing developments, where newly built homes surround mounts of upturned earth; the frontier between interior and exterior, demarcated by fences, windows, topiary. His photographs deromanticise the popularly sentimental, with landscapes interrupted by utilitarian infrastructure, and yet their sensitivity to light, framing and texture give them a cinematic quality. Responding to the increasingly dematerialised nature of contemporary image making, Cunnane remains connected to the physicality of the production process, printing his photographs by hand in a darkroom. The resulting C-type prints are relatively small in size, resonating with the restrained, intimate nature of the work.
Read MoreSamuel Laurence Cunnane has been the subject of exhibitions at Kerlin Gallery (2020); OCT Boxes Museum of Art, Shunde, China (2018), Öktem&Aykut, Istanbul (2017); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2016) and THEODORE: Art, New York (2015). Recent group exhibitions and projects include National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (2019) and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (2018). Cunnane's work can be found in the collections of OCT Boxes Art Museum, Shunde, China; The TIA Collection, Sante Fe, USA; the National Gallery of Ireland; the Arts Council of Ireland; the Trinity College Art Collection, Dublin. A publication with a text by Brian Dillon, Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London, was published in 2020 and is available online.
Text courtesy Kerlin Gallery.
