Staring at a Painted Sky
Martina Cleary

There are nocturnal visitors. The quiet unseen life of the world when the traffic has stopped, and the planes are grounded. There is no more busyness now to distract the eye. If the night were only as full of the wild things as it once was. The forest, the bog, the marshlands and in-between spaces. I turn the camera on myself, becoming animal, returning to the world. Creeping about online into the small hours, imagining Africa behind the hedgerows.

Corona, the radiance of the sun made visible, when day becomes night. Time stands still for long enough to notice. A young elephant kicks its own waste in quiet despair. A penguin sits catatonic, staring at a painted sky.
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Martina Cleary is an Irish-Finnish contemporary artist, working through photography, video, performance, sound and new digital technologies to create immersive installation environments which explore memory as a starting point. Her work navigates spaces between the real and fictional, influenced by aesthetic and conceptual ideas drawn from painting, cinema, Jungian psychology, experimental archaeology and Feminist philosophy. ²

About the Series

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

About the Publisher

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