Botanic Gardens Ireland
My most recent photographs created in Botanic Gardens in Belfast and Dublin. These camera-based images overlap with my interests in botanical paintings (see also "Isolations within Nature" series). Here, I explore gardens in Ireland as psychological spaces through the lens of my Irish heritage, with alternating closed and open compositions revealing rhythms of walls, paths and windows.
Isolations within Nature
This series of paintings and drawings begun in 2024 attempts to articulate a search for threads of hope, humanity and solidarity within a socially and politically unhinging world.
Here, plants resist the weight of a leaden earth through their upward struggle, displaying resilience despite the toxicity of the landscape in which they germinate.
Erie Observations
Photographing from the north shore of Lake Erie facing America, I explore the majesty of Lake Erie while simultaneously seeking visual analogies to my thoughts, emotions and political anxieties within the changing atmospheric patterns above the lake and reflected upon its water. These transformations of atmosphere and weather become recognitions of nature's power on one hand, and emblems of rapidly changing geopolitics on the other.
A Quiet Passage, France
Like other urban landscape work that Hugh has done, his photos of cities in France are informed by his interests in signage, ambiguous meanings within the relationships of objects and architecture, his experience of being a pedestrian walking within the city, the emotions that he feels when light and weather transform his surroundings, and also how urban environments come to reflect their inhabitants.
Walls
In these photographs from Hugh's ongoing Walls series, the literal and metaphoric signs within the city are composed to relate to one another in unusual ways. Hugh attempts to charge the imagination, the vehicle of entrance, with questions of what may exist within and beyond the architecture. In this respect, the images manifest both psychological and socio-political associations that are leveraged by the ambiguities within the found place.
The Great Forest
The Great Forest was born of Hugh's interest in protecting natural ecosystems and his desire to record the grandeur of Ontario's forests, both closer to home and in the near north parks like Killarney. The title choice of the series references a title attributed to a painting by 17th century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael, whose paintings were an inspiration for the series.
