Siobhan Ogilvy

b. 1972, Scotland

The series Still Water explores the meeting points between nature and culture, specifically around the Royal Canal in Dublin. The canal never functioned as the essential national artery that its creators had envisaged. Despite this, mooted conversions of the canal bed to railway or motorway never happened. It is still here, still water. All around it development encroaches – roads, railways, housing, industrial buildings, construction. Yet it remains a tranquil, rural environment. Neither waste ground nor functioning waterway, it is an ambiguous space, a terrain vague, that has resisted the rampant urbanisation that surrounds it.

Hallowed Ground looks at the intersection of conflicting ideas within a space. The photographs explore the interiors of two controversial building projects. In the mid-1970s Dublin Corporation began work on the construction of their civic offices, located on the site of the city’s original Viking settlement. In the same period, the decision to build the ESB’s headquarters on Fitzwilliam Street resulted in the destruction of a large section of the longest remaining Georgian street in Britain or Ireland. Despite major protests, both buildings were constructed on the intended sites and to this day are controversial for how they look and for what they signify. There is a resulting tension between how people feel about the buildings, the spaces they inhabit, how they look and how they function.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)