COMPELLING PHOTOGRAPHS OF INVENTED SPACES

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled pitches us into a disorientating world, a place both familiar and impossible, dreamlike in the way normally separate categories of things flow seamlessly into one another. Similarly, Ailbhe Ni Bhriain’s photographs draw us into a paradoxical space in which inside and outside, the real and the imaginary are fused in a way that is dreamlike, with an edgily nightmarish quality. The space Ní Bhriain creates by ingeniously combining a myriad of source imagery has the effect of diminishing the viewer’s sense of being in control.

We don’t quite know how to read these images. They are involving and disturbing in equal measure. Ní Bhriain studied at the Crawford college of Art in Cork, and went on to complete an MA and a PhD in London and Surrey. Most of her work comes from a series made during a residency at the Cork Film Centre, under the title Palimpsest.