Sorika

Northern Ireland Alternatives is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographic art works In The Shadow Of The Butterfly Bush by Gareth McConnell. McConnell is celebrated for working in an unlikely spectrum of subjects that include youth, style and fashion, animals, psychedelia, sectarianism, plants flowers and trees, and addiction and the visual vocabularies of drugs culture. He was born in 1972 in Northern Ireland and grew up during the Troubles. The photographs and exhibition are a special commission by Northern Ireland Alternatives, a charity who work to maintain community and repair social harm in Northern Ireland, through the successful implementation and teaching of restorative justice practices.

McConnell’s In The Shadow Of The Butterfly Bush comprises multiple photographic diptychs, arranged in a choreographed format. Each diptych contains two photographs: one of a person who has been supported by Northern Ireland Alternatives, and one of a Butterfly (Buddleia) Bush. The Butterfly Bush is a common flowering plant and can represent a dichotomy; sometimes viewed as a reviled nuisance weed, symbolising urban and social decay; and sometimes as a greatly welcomed, very attractive and fragrant, garden shrub. McConnell’s depictions of people and butterfly plants give strong emphasis to how identity is subject to the variable relationships of the individual and the group, and explores equivalences and differences between ideas of growth, change, order and confusion, beauty, and hope. The works are highly coloured and technically exciting.