House Rules
Chris Finnegan

The photographs in House Rules present participatory acts and events that unfolded over a fixed period of time in a family home. All images adhere to the parameters that they must have been made in this home, during the five year period of occupation and must be representations of real-life, unstaged occurrences. The resulting series illustrates the experience of shared living in a family context. Events of work, learning, creativity and play form a collaborative lexicon here, with various themes recurring over time. The ownership of these events are left without demarcation; hinting at the question of whether the domestic can be considered an arena for the collaborative making of meaning and performative co-action. ¹

Chris Finnegan is a visual artist and educator based in Cork whose practice explores common phenomena and occurrences, primarily through lens-based media.The mundane qualities of objects and events are often exploited and presented with a pseudo-scientific rigour.
Permutations, sequencing and progressions are employed, sometimes logically.Throughout the work, the photographic image can be seen to occupy two simultaneous states; empirical artefact and conceptualist proposition.²

TLP Editions are an ongoing collection of contemporary photographic projects in the form of accessible and inexpensive publications by PhotoIreland. These A5 sized booklets present a standard format throughout the series, with 36 pages each, a cover with a text block of under 140 words that introduces the project, and the title and the artist name only available on the contra cover. The project creates a node of opportunities as it allows photographers to enter the publishing arena, while facilitating access to contemporary artistic practices to the general public. ³

Founded in 2009, PhotoIreland was conceived as an organisation to stimulate a dialogue around photography in Ireland by developing a varied array of initiatives and events with a strong participative approach.
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