Stray
Paul Gaffney

Stray was released in 2015 as a limited edition handmade artist’s book and was nominated for the MACK First Book Award, and the Photobook Award 2016 at the 8th International Photobook Festival, and was included in a Photobook Phenomenon exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, in Spain. ¹

Paul Gaffney’s practice-led research is concerned with how we experience landscape through movement, in a multisensorial and tactile way, rather than organising and viewing it from a separate, isolated distance, as per the rules of the Western pictorial tradition.
In particular, he is interested in exploring how the non-visual senses may be activated to develop a heightened awareness of both the body and environment, and one of these approaches has included walking and photographing in forests at night.
Stray was made in near total darkness and its sequence of images suggests a slow careful movement through a dark, enclosed space.

Paul Gaffney holds an MFA in Photography from Ulster University and his practice-led PhD research explores different ways of experiencing and representing the landscape, and how the act of image making can both enable and disrupt a sense of flow and connection with our environment.
His work has received a number of awards including the Arts Council’s `Next Generation Award’ and Visual Arts Bursaries, the FSAS Digital Media Award, and a Strategic Projects Award from Wicklow Arts Office.

Gaffney’s books have been nominated for the Photobook Award at the International Photobook Festival Kassel (2013 & 2016) and shortlisted for the European Publishers Award for Photography, and he has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in the US, UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain, Australia and China.