Dunganese

Summer 2024

Ard Bia is hosting Aoibheann MacNamara’s second photographic exhibition titled Dunganese- which is a coastal desert region in the south of England. This exhibition has a fixation on features in the natural landscape that gives context of time and location.

As an artist of photography, she works in automatic and lets the light largely dictate the work. This is by design and by its nature largely more bleached out like the barren landscape depicted throughout the pieces.

Long since mentioned in murmurs of elusiveness, Dungenese has often been the preserve of artists and writers - most notably the great Derek Jarmon.

His tar-washed yellow windowed hut of iconic standing is the big draw but from there, a bigger aesthetic story evolves. Nuclear power stations, fish huts, lighthouses, colourful fishing debris, signal stations and much more presents a set design for escapist theatre in the shape of time spent there and of time removed.

This body of work, created over several early morning windswept walks while staying at the fog signal house in March 2024, pays homage to the beauty of a place that is like a moonscape with the most evocative structures within that scape.

“The muted colours of the images are untouched and left in their bleached-out state in a nod to analogue film we could not change once shot,” explained Aoibheann.

For more information call into Ard Bia on the Spanish Arch.