Willie Doherty, IS AND IS NOT

15 Oct-19 Nov 2022

PV 15 Oct 2022, 5-7pm

Willie Doherty

Overview

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of black and white photographic works by Willie Doherty. 

In this most recent series, Doherty’s starkly atmospheric images reveal the residual traces that mark the surfaces and fabric of natural and built environments. Places that have been formed by the long slow processes of geological time and that have been shaped by the consequences of human intervention: conflict, inequality, neglect, and injustice. 

These are works that are characterized by Doherty’s watchful reticent intensity, and by his assertion that the image cannot be fixed, cannot be fully comprehended and known. His attention draws us to the small details and nuances of diverse spaces, the materiality of brick, concrete, metal, grass, trees, and wildflowers. There is an unsettled, restless sense of place. Everywhere there are indications of disorder, breakdown, and failure coexistent with signs of growth, recovery, and endurance. 

Poetry is found in the most reluctant of places. The brutality of decay transforms into a still and silent beauty, the ambiguity of oppositions yielding to a serene resoluteness existing between somewhere and nowhere. Unfamiliarity is exposed in familiar territory, as disregarded landscapes are no longer forgotten, their histories becoming the fictions of memory. 

The passage of time, and the eventual erasure of all traces, pervades these images through the uneasy quiescence between what was and what is, what is and is not. In Doherty’s work, the sublime is determinate, the ignored no longer unseen.

For further information and high-res images, please contact Rosa Abbott, [email protected].

Artists