This year’s exhibition is different. As graduates, we have had to adapt to new and challenging circumstances. Moving to an online environment, we had to think of alternate ways to make our Graduate Exhibition come to life. In its translation into a digital space, the very real and tactile nature of the work we produce is obscured. In our daily lives, there is a sense of human and material touch which is equally obscured. Working from home, graduates are in a new environment. Their creative output extends into their domestic lives as their studies come to a close. It is the parallel between the materiality of our work and the absence of the sense touch that frames this year’s Graduate Exhibition.

This website presents the work of 102 graduating students from the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts, School of Mechanical and Design Engineering and School of Media. The exhibition represents the culmination of years of full-time study and gives our students the opportunity to showcase the results of their imagination, hard work, and creative skills.

Identity by Joana Ferreira, Hugh Kavanagh, Eva Martin, Ben Nagle.

TU Dublin School of Creative Arts
TU Dublin School of Mechanical and Design Engineering
TU Dublin School of Media

Contemporary Visual Culture

Roisin Cahill
Talking Points

‘Seeing in the Dark’ was a semi-public event held at the LAB Gallery, Foley Street in December of our final year. As part of the ‘Talking Points’ module, our class decided to explore the theme of the ‘Night’ in Dublin and each individual contributed to an evening of presentations that addressed night culture in the capital as well as a panel discussion with representatives from Give Us The Night campaign and FourFour magazine.

roisincahill@yahoo.ie

Street Photography: A Document of Dublin’s Dark Demise

By employing O’Connell Street, a core intersection of Dublin’s inner city, as a point of reference for evaluation and discussion, my presentation shed light on contemporary visual and literary images of the urban capital by night. Through the lens of street photography, a critical analysis of such images in contrast with those of the last century reveals the O’Connell Street of today (or rather, tonight) as a dejected, lonely and crime-filled site; one to avoid after dark. But was it always this way?

Eamonn Doyle’s 2019 ‘Made in Dublin’ exhibition is a fitting place to start in establishing a present-day portrayal of the city by night and accompanying texts by Kevin Barry reaffirm his bleak depiction. Contrasting this with selected photographs from the Arthur Fields ‘Man on Bridge’ collection covering the mid-1900s allows for an investigation into the changing nature of the image portrayed of O’Connell Street by night in the twenty-first century, as opposed to the previous one.

Adopting the philosophical concept of ‘lifeworlds’ as applied by Justin Carville to post-Celtic Tiger Irish photography, that is, the understanding of place as lived through everyday experiences, I take the human subjects of Doyle, Barry and Fields’ work to constitute an accurate representation of O’Connell Street through each artist’s lens. Differing depictions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries point to the changeable nature of the street’s image by night, establishing the practice of street photography as an artistic document of this evolution and the O’Connell Street intersection as a bridge in time.