Ailbhe Greaney

b. 1979, Ireland

This work is an investigation into the nature of ‘home’. Where predominantly set forth as diptychs, the image on the left was photographed in Ireland and the image on the right in New York.

This project began with my parents, and it is with them that the meaning of the work may be best located. From here the work’s point of view has grown outwards to express itself in a series of landscapes and in a further series of portraits, picturing friends, peers and strangers who reside in New York but have been born elsewhere. I present these subjects as an embodiment of the concept of ‘home’, while still emphasising place as an important shaper of that ‘home’. Visualising such people in Ireland and New York blurs the line between which place is really home and begs the question, what is home? How do we reconcile ourselves with place so as to understand that which is unfamiliar? Here the environment is malleable, a hybrid of two or many more worlds. Transformations that reveal themselves within my subjects are a reflection of the continual transformation of such New York City spaces by those many people seeking home there. In this case I am transforming those places by positioning within them people that belong some place else.

Ultimately images are something like flashlights winking at one another across a gap. They are an attempt to fill a stage. In leaving, my parents have become something new together. In leaving, I too have become new and there is the hope. This I believe is the essence of all leavings.

(Text: too early for vacation catalogue, 2008)