£3,500.00
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A vacant red corner seat, heavy with unspoken history, anchors this evocative composition. The rigid verticality of the wallpaper—lines stretching endlessly upwards—suggests an unseen force, a quiet oppression, or an aspiration toward something beyond. These parallel lines reinforce a sense of order and control, yet they also frame the emptiness, pressing in on the absence at the seat’s heart.
Circular buttons punctuate the upholstery, echoing the eternal cycle of life and death, their soft geometry contrasting with the harsh rectilinear rigidity of the checkered floor. Dirty red and white squares clash in a pattern of stark duality—blood and bone, passion and absence, life and void. The seat itself, its base fractured and gaping, is more than just neglected furniture; it becomes an open coffin, a death ship cast adrift like the Raft of Medusa, its occupants already lost to time.
What was said here? What happened in this space before silence claimed it? The broken board at the base hints at something ruptured—a moment of violence, of collapse, of history erasing itself. This is not just an empty seat; it is an echo, a specter, a vessel that once held something, someone, now gone.
This work is part of Gareth McConnell’s acclaimed early series, Portraits & Interiors from the Albert Bar, shot in a paramilitary bar in his hometown of Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. A place weighted with history, Carrickfergus was where Prince William of Orange landed before his battle against King James, a turning point in the island’s sectarian past. Taken over the Easter period of 1999, as the terms of the Good Friday Agreement were being enacted, McConnell’s images capture a space on the cusp of transformation—one steeped in the remnants of conflict, its walls bearing witness to an era that was both ending and lingering on.