£15,000.00
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Gareth McConnell’s Night Flowers series transforms the overlooked into the luminous, capturing urban blooms in the eerie stillness of the night. Using long exposures and available street lighting, McConnell reveals flowers growing in unexpected places—on traffic islands, in the shadows of corporate towers, along the edges of housing estates. These images radiate with an almost hallucinatory glow, their rich, saturated hues emerging from darkness like fleeting apparitions.
McConnell’s work has long explored themes of beauty, violence, and transcendence. His Night Flowers—delicate yet resilient—exist within this same tension. As Alison Green notes, flowers are symbols of renewal, but their beauty is bound to transience, evoking both wonder and loss. In the context of McConnell’s earlier work on sectarian violence and addiction, these luminous blossoms become quiet acts of defiance, fragile moments of hope amid the chaos of the city.
Held in major collections including the British Council and UBS, and featured in Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives on Photography, Night Flowers offers a poetic meditation on survival, light, and the unexpected places where beauty persists.
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‘…There is a another tap on the door. Which you now, slowly, pull open …knowing who is going to be there – a psychopath with fermenting breath and too much beer inside, someone who is both Republican and Loyalist, and who informs you that you are considered a burden on your community. It is you. THE PERSON AT THE DOOR IS YOU: YOU HAVE GRASSED YOURSELF, AND YOU ARE GOING TO BEAT YOURSELF UP. Holy God – not only are you the wrong religion, politics or faction, or a druggie instead of an alkie (or perhaps a figurative painter, whereas you should be a conceptually based visual artist, working in photography, or vice versa), but your trousers/ cardigan/ skirt are indeed quite, quite wrong. You are deeply uncool, AND YOU ARE GOING TO BEAT YOURSELF UP …
Thus insulted, your low self-esteem or helplessness requires you to bow to the inexorable righteousness of a profoundly negative auto-destruction, which means there is no exit out back – no lightly jumping over the garden wall as is done in films. Silhouetted in the murderous sodium streetlight you stand, the two yourselfs, each looking at the other, in an ancient complicity of divided torment. Into the rain and cold you go – maybe observing out of the corner of your eye something incongruously inappropriate to your situation. Something like Night Flowers, (2002) whose strange beauty causes you to wince.
On you go, each of the two of you, to a place where you will inflict on yourself crude agonies of pain, of such miserable effectiveness, that you may be permanently disfigured, mentally and physically; suffering a trauma so severe that you may – blessedly – lose consciousness, or worse: perhaps lapse into coma, or bleed to death …motherless, fatherless, alone.’
Neal Brown, Gareth McConnell, Contemporary British Photographers, Steidl, 2005