Victor Sloan

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Victor Sloan was born in 1945 in Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He studied at the Royal School, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone and Belfast and Leeds Colleges of Art, the latter in England. He lives and works in Portadown, County Armagh in Northern Ireland.

Employing primarily the medium of photography, he manipulates his negatives and reworks his prints with paints, inks, toners and dyes. In addition to photography, he also uses video, and printmaking techniques.¹

Sloan’s works are a response to political, social and religious concerns. He is perhaps best known for his works investigating the Orange Order in series such as: Drumming; The Walk, the Platform and the Field and The Birches. ²

Sloan was awarded an MBE in 2002.  ⁴

The Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast held a major exhibition of his work (Victor Sloan: Selected Works 1980–2000) in 2001. In 2008, the exhibition History, Locality, Allegiance, curated by Peter Richards at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, brought together a comprehensive selection of past works, with a particular focus on his video works. ⁵

His exhibition Victor Sloan: Drift, ⁶curated by Dr Riann Coulter, Curator of the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio and Feargal O’Malley, Curator at the University of Ulster, explored a related though distinct area, tracing the story of the Vietnamese Boat People who settled in Craigavon, Northern Ireland in 1979.

In preparation for this exhibition, Sloan rekindled his friendship with Ka Fue Lay, ⁷ who was a teenager when he settled in Craigavon in 1979 and now lives in Salisbury, England. Sloan made a video ⁸ in which Ka Fue Lay discusses his life in Vietnam, displays family photographs and fondly recalls his time in Craigavon. The exhibition also includes Sloan’s black and white photographs of Craigavon from the late 1970s and early 1980s, contemporary images that he created by scratching, painting and bleaching photographic prints, and recent work including large colour photographs of Moyraverty.

Sloan’s exhibition Before,⁹ in Belfast Exposed Gallery, Belfast, 2017, revealed an excerpt from an extensive but little-seen body of archival photographs that Sloan made in the 1970s and 80s in Northern Ireland. The images document the activities and characters that populated Sloan’s daily life; the urban development of his hometown of Craigavon; and the constant and pervasive presence of the political conflict.

For the artist these photographs functioned as a type of preliminary ‘sketchbook’, shaping the distinctive style and thematics he would later become known for. Viewed together as an exhibition they represent Sloan’s significant contribution to the tradition of Northern Irish documentary practice.¹⁰

Books about Sloan and his work include Marking the North by Brian McAvera (1989),¹¹Victor Sloan: Selected Works by Aidan Dunne (2001),¹²Victor Sloan: Walk, by Jürgen Schneider (2004),¹³ and Luxus by Glenn Patterson (2007).