Ive had the pleasure of exhibiting with the Kildare Arts Collective on a number of occasions and this one to me was a special one as it was the first time I had exhibited in the Riverbank Arts Centre with work created in NCAD.

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The exhibition was with a host of Kildare based artists with the theme "Boundaries" where each artist would interpret the theme as long as it was within the boundaries of County Kildare. 

 

My work was called Unknown Pleasures and was presented as "stellar photography" with an accompanying spiel of how I had photographed the skies above the Curragh plains with an elaborate camera set up and used a digital program to map the stars above and printed it on photographic paper...when in fact, it was photographic paper, but the imagery was created using sellotape, jumper fluff and dust particles.

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It was an elaborate ruse, an experiment in the validity of the "art gallery", the power of fake news and believing everything you read.  I was influenced by the conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta and his work called Constellations, in which he presented photographs of the night sky and stars that had supposedly been taken at the Laboratory of the Astrophysics Institute in the Canary Islands, when really the photographs were of bugs and dirt on the windscreen of his car.