THIS HURTS. (queerness, mortality, youth and obsession)
★ a photo collection by Audrey Gillespie ★
Audrey Gillespie is an Irish fine artist from Derry, Northern Ireland — currently living and creating in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Through analogue photography, painting and printmaking, Gillespie's explores queerness, mortality, youth and anxiety.
“This Hurts specifically explores obsession, release and fantasy. My work runs in circles, building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Questions that ease me and questions that haunt me. Photography acts as a social space and later, a form of isolation. Ritualistic. I build comfort with this routine. Night and darkness (a space and time cherished from young memories) both feature prominently in my photography. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout my work, in the form of subtext and saturation.
Everything I do, I do out of fear. Just as we all do, every day. I fear age and I panic to immortalise my peers, my relationships and my current youth at this hyper conscious point of my life. I fear isolation, I fear not living a good enough life, I fear the guilt I’ll feel if I do live the fullest life because some don’t have that fortune. I fear I’m driving myself to madness. I fear I’d never really know life at all if I wasn’t mad. I fear it’s all happening too quickly. I fear it can’t happen quick enough. I fear I’ll never be able to make a real decision ever again.
I’m trying to understand why I desire to live through other things; masquerading myself as them through my photographs, bleeding my persona into theirs as they do onto mine. I’ve spent so long trying to be one step ahead of the person that I thought I was always going to become, and I fear I’ll spend a life time trying to become something else, so much so that I’ll never get to know myself. I fear that my art is just an unhealthy obsession enabling me to exploit my bad habits. As a young woman, the tendency to obsess has been cemented into my being, since I even consciously knew how to obsess at all.
I try and snatch fleeting moments before they’re gone, clinging to whatever brings me release. I filter my anxiety into power, power that builds the foundation that makes me make art, which could be called a catharsis.
I fixate my anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories on creating colour-saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for me to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
I document queer youth through my interactions, stumbling around on this island in Northern Ireland. Driven by a hazy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleary emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form, with 35mm format photography and camcorders, colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse myself into a self-constructed personalised fantasy.”
