Ruth Connolly

Born 13th July 1987 (Galway)
Website ruthconnolly.com

Ruth Connolly is a commercial and fine art photographer, living and working in Dublin. Her book ‘If you lived here, you’d be home by now’ was published in 2017 by The Velvet Cell. Her editorial commissions include Travel + Leisure Magazine, Cara Magazine, Totally Dublin and Turf & Grain Magazine. Her commercial clients include Ulster Bank, Viva Airlines Colombia, Bunsen, Oxmantown Skincare and Industry & Co. She works part time as a photography lecturer at Dublin Institute of Design. She holds a Masters in Photography from Central Saint Martins London, and a BA in Fine Art Printmaking from Limerick School of Art and Design.

Publications

Photography books by Ruth Connolly

2017 If you lived here, you’d be home by now The Velvet Cell, ISBN 978-1-908889-43-0 ¹ ²

Awards and honours

2017, 2014 Shortlisted for Fotofilmic Travelling Exhibition Award, Fotofilmic, Vancouver, Canada
2011 VAI Directors Award, Visual Arts Ireland, Dublin, Ireland

Exhibitions

Group exhibitions

2017 How to Flatten a Mountain, Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, Ireland
2017 K-Fest Arts Festival, Kilkenny, Ireland
2016 Home Truths, International Photography Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel
2014 The House That Jack Built, Well St. Gallery, London, UK
2013 Intersectional London, Netil House, London, UK
2012 Tulca Festival, Galway, Ireland

Projects

Each Evening We See The Sun Set (2017)
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.” – John Berger
This work was made during my time at How to Flatten a Mountain, a twelve day artist residency at Cow House Studios in Wexford. The residency took place in rural Ireland, in a place so overwhelmingly familiar to me, it was as though I was looking at memories of my own childhood. Acutely aware that I had never been here before, I tried to make sense of this uncanny feeling that what I was seeing was not really my own, by photographing the place as I experienced it. I gathered together these images in a false bank of memories which has been made into a book, exhibited alongside prints at Rathfarnham Castle as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2017.

If you lived here, you’d be home by now (2016)
This work questions the existence and function of Ireland’s ghost estates. Lingering since the economic crash of 2008, these sites of abandoned domestic aspirations exist between loss and regeneration in a time out of joint. As I move through the estates alone, with only the mechanical click of my Bronica interrupting the silence, I consider the ghostliness of these things, appearing in likeness to a house as a ghost appears in likeness to a body.This series was made for my degree show as part of my MA in Photography from Central Saint Martins. It was exhibited at Tel Aviv International Photography Festival in April 2016. It was published as a photobook by The Velvet Cell in March 2017, which has been shortlisted for the Fotofilmic travelling exhibition.