Martin Healy

b. 1967, Ireland

In the last five years I have worked with photography as my principal medium. Frequently I have used large-scale prints with heavily saturated colours to acknowledge the influence of both cinema and painting on my work. The concepts in my work generally explore the psychological space of childhood and adolescence, particularly in relation to the male child, either through my own experiences or from themes that reoccur in contemporary culture.

In a series entitled Familiar from 1999, I explored the psychological dynamics that can exist in a specific domestic space, and in particular I was trying to recreate a sense of the uncanny encroaching on domesticity – a theme that is frequently explored in cinema and one that I return to periodically. In recent work, I have been exploring the role cinema plays in establishing the stereotypes of adolescent behaviour. In this series of work, images from film of possessed youth were culled directly from the television screen and placed together to create a large-scale photographic triptych entitled Little Devils. Each of the images has a subtitle which is a reference to the banal media rhetoric used to describe young males who have committed crimes seemingly out of context with their character.

(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)