{"title":"Framed works","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xiii-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XIII, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s Dream Meadow series reimagines the floral still life through a lens of psychedelia and transcendence. In art history, flowers have long been symbols of beauty and decay, from the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age—where lush bouquets stood as memento mori—to Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual, oversized blossoms, vibrating with life and ambiguity. McConnell extends this lineage into the electric glow of contemporary culture, fusing the botanical with the visual language of raves, religious iconography, and the euphoric disarray of memory.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRather than capturing flowers as static objects, McConnell’s images dissolve them into pure sensation. Long exposures and controlled movement cause petals to blur and vibrate, as if caught in a perpetual state of becoming. Their hyper-saturated hues pulse like club lights refracted through a haze of sweat and euphoria, echoing the fleeting, altered states of late 20th-century youth culture. Yet, beneath their radiance lies a shadow of disorder—flowers as symbols of sectarian divisions, of addiction, of transience. In his world, petals bloom like blood dispersing in a syringe, and beauty teeters on the edge of oblivion.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike Andy Warhol’s Flowers series, which transformed the simple hibiscus into an emblem of pop-cultural beauty and mass production, McConnell’s images hover between the seductive and the sinister. His flowers are not just botanical specimens but vessels of history, identity, and desire—blooming, bleeding, and fading in an intoxicating rush of color and light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement. Eschewing digital post-production techniques, McConnell achieves his heightened images when shooting, through the deft manipulation of light, movement and long exposures.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O’Hagan, The Observer\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eFlowers and flower colours: God’s colours. Honour thy mother and father. Take pleasure in the deep petal beauty of the rose and the the similarly wondrous, roseate floridity of the alcohol-dependent noses of the fathers – breathing like beasts, asleep on their sofas. Note: the sofas not necessarily compliant with The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire Safety) Regulations Act 1988 (amended 1989, and 1993) in respect of resistance to cigarette ignition. Flowers as identifier codes of sectarian loyalties. Mothers: make a nice flower arrangement for your home: white lily (republican), orange lily (loyalist), shamrock (Ireland), and opium poppy (addicts). Fine Liberty print shirts with dried blood and crusted mucous on them – intravenous drug use is also good for the home mood effect. Honour the haemorrhage colours – the pretty flower colours of illness and fatality. Note: the movement of blood from the vein up into a syringe during injection is what addicts call ‘drawback’ – the blood creates shapes within the drug liquid in the syringe that are known as ‘flowers’ and which may be conducive to certain kinds of contemplative pleasure\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eGareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"extended_description open\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt would be remiss of me not to mention the cool psychedelia that pervades McConnell’s work over the past decade. He has gone from using the techniques of a perhaps more salutary “documentary” style and has slowly loosened his grip on those austere technicalities to assume a lack of control in focus, shutter etc. which promotes a much more free and transcendent vision, not without allegory to Brion Gysin, Kenneth Anger and perhaps the musical interludes of Psychick Youth. In suggesting this, I am suggesting a consistency in McConnell’s mid-career that is inspiring.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43498244341972,"sku":"","price":6000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Meadow-XIII-2021-50x62-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-004.jpg?v=1749214700"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xxxiv-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XXXIV, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s \u003cem\u003eDream Meadow\u003c\/em\u003e series exists in a heightened realm where color, light, and texture dissolve into a euphoric haze. Saturated in hallucinatory hues, the image pulsates with the afterglow of rave culture—an echo of the phosphorescent trails left by nightclub strobes, of bodies dissolving into music and movement. Alistair O’Neil, writing in \u003cem\u003eAperture\u003c\/em\u003e magazine, likens McConnell’s palette to the distilled essence of late 20th-century youth culture, recalling the blurred ecstasy of Dave Swindells’s 1990s club photography or the chemically altered tones of Andy Bettles’s \u003cem\u003eThe Face\u003c\/em\u003e editorials.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHere, McConnell’s photographic language abandons traditional documentary clarity, embracing an aesthetic closer to dream logic—an evolution Brad Feuerhelm links to the psychedelic mysticism of Brion Gysin and Kenneth Anger. With his \u003cem\u003eDream Meadow\u003c\/em\u003e works, McConnell continues his shift towards abstraction, where form gives way to pure sensation. The flowers, luminous and untethered, seem to float within the frame, untamed and electric. Like Derek Jarman’s \u003cem\u003eThe Garden\u003c\/em\u003e (1990), where nocturnal blooms shimmer in Super-8 glow, McConnell’s meadow offers a vision of beauty that is fleeting, ungraspable, and deeply intoxicating.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement. Eschewing digital post-production techniques, McConnell achieves his heightened images when shooting, through the deft manipulation of light, movement and long exposures.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSean O’Hagan, \u003cem\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eFlowers and flower colours: God’s colours. Honour thy mother and father. Take pleasure in the deep petal beauty of the rose and the the similarly wondrous, roseate floridity of the alcohol-dependent noses of the fathers – breathing like beasts, asleep on their sofas. Note: the sofas not necessarily compliant with The Furniture and Furnishings (Fire Safety) Regulations Act 1988 (amended 1989, and 1993) in respect of resistance to cigarette ignition. Flowers as identifier codes of sectarian loyalties. Mothers: make a nice flower arrangement for your home: white lily (republican), orange lily (loyalist), shamrock (Ireland), and opium poppy (addicts). Fine Liberty print shirts with dried blood and crusted mucous on them – intravenous drug use is also good for the home mood effect. Honour the haemorrhage colours – the pretty flower colours of illness and fatality. Note: the movement of blood from the vein up into a syringe during injection is what addicts call ‘drawback’ – the blood creates shapes within the drug liquid in the syringe that are known as ‘flowers’ and which may be conducive to certain kinds of contemplative pleasure\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, \u003cem\u003eThe Meaning of Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eGareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"extended_description open\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"extended_description open\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neil, \u003cem\u003eAperture\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt would be remiss of me not to mention the cool psychedelia that pervades McConnell’s work over the past decade. He has gone from using the techniques of a perhaps more salutary “documentary” style and has slowly loosened his grip on those austere technicalities to assume a lack of control in focus, shutter etc. which promotes a much more free and transcendent vision, not without allegory to Brion Gysin, Kenneth Anger and perhaps the musical interludes of Psychick Youth. In suggesting this, I am suggesting a consistency in McConnell’s mid-career that is inspiring.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, \u003cem\u003eAmericanSuburbX\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43498255909076,"sku":"","price":4000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Meadow-XXXIV-2022-50x62-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-003.jpg?v=1749204331"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxiii-2022","title":"Dream Blossom XXIII, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLess a photograph and more a hallucination—an acid-drenched vision of cherry blossoms melting into pure light. His florals don’t sit politely in vases; they pulsate, bleed color, and flicker between beauty and something more ominous, more unhinged. The blossoms seem radioactive, their petals dissolving into a dreamstate where nature glitches, loops, and mutates.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown, in \u003cem\u003eThe Meaning Of Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e, dissects how blooms are never just blooms—always standing in for something else, whether sex, decay, or ritual. Cherry blossoms, in particular, are overloaded with symbolism: in Japanese mono no aware, they are exquisite and doomed, petals dropping like tiny death scenes; in Western kitsch, they’re aestheticized into wallpaper, perfume, and café lattes. McConnell distorts these histories, warping the soft delicacy of blossoms into something chemically heightened, where the line between reverie and reality frays.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis \u003cem\u003eDream Blossom\u003c\/em\u003e works feels less like a tribute to nature’s fleeting beauty and more like a fever dream of its digital afterlife—a flower photographed, filtered, re-processed, and reborn in hyper-color, its fragile symbolism stretched to the edge of collapse.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eMcConnell’s \u003cem\u003eFrieze Week \u003c\/em\u003eflowers – ecstasies of trippy-beauty – effervescence and fluorescence. Post-contagion-hedonism-colours. McConnell’s Frieze posters\/down in the dark, in the tube – sugar-high intoxication colours, growing out of the fertile, warm dark dust of London’s tube platforms. McConnell’s specialist horticultural knowledge makes his flowers retinally absolute – pure, Class A, medicinal grade. Flash. Flash. Flash. Separation and disjunction. The retina’s relationship of service to the brain becomes a little less servile – render unto brain seizure that which is brain seizure’s . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, \u003cem\u003eThe Meaning of Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43498274357460,"sku":"","price":900.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Blossom-XXIII-2022-Gareth-McConnell-19.5-x-24-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1744203303"},{"product_id":"night-flower-tokyo-ii-2007","title":"Night Flower (Tokyo II), 2007","description":"\u003cp\u003e__________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell’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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHeld 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eREADMORE\u003cbr\u003e__________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘It’s Springtime and it’s dark and the city sleeps. Flowers emerge in strange places and he notices the flowers and then he photographs the flowers. Medium format. Tripod. Extended exposures, no flash. Tungsten-balanced film and available street lighting. And the camera sees the flowers quite differently from the eye. It offers up a glimpse into the optical unconscious. It shows us things that we never expected to find. Things that we never expected to see.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor McConnell the sublime and the monumental and the oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful always reside in the people and the places and the things where you’d least expect to find them. In the Sectarian mural. In the Undertakers. In the Crackhouse. In the violated body. In the maligned and the marginalized. In the half-way-home. The oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful. In people and places and things where you’d least expect to find it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Night Flowers are no different. They are a series of minor photographic revelations. Revelations in the sense that they reveal what the eye cannot see and what the night will not give up and what the city’s chaos and filth and concrete foreverness largely denies. They reveal a chance encounter with fragility, stillness and beauty. In the middle of a traffic island. In the shadow of a Corporate HQ. On a street in the ghetto. They offer transcendence, escapism and redemption. They reveal it where you’d least expect to find it. Colour in the dead of night.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Flowers are, of course, deeply symbolic of renewal. Their beauty is bound up in the knowledge that it is momentary. Beauty pierces your heart because it is painful. It is about loss, transience, and wonder at its very existence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s photographs of his bed and flowers have to be understood with his other work in mind. The motivation and poignance behind the images in Meditations (2004–08), Night Flowers (2002–10), make little sense if you don’t know McConnell’s shocking and affective images in the series Anti-Social Behaviour Parts I \u0026amp; II (1995) — victims of paramilitary punishment beatings in his homeland of Northern Ireland, or IV drug users who were his friends and sometime community. This is true of beautiful things, isn’t it? Beauty is cloying and saccharine when it’s too easily granted.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell shoots Night Flowers in ambient light and with a long exposure. He takes the pictures during nocturnal walks, another temporal experience out of the workaday. Similar to the beds, the flowers become still, central objects, isolated from their context (they are not hothouse but urban flowers, growing alongside commercial strips and housing estates). In some, a spray is classically composed against a background, blossoms burgeoning; in others the image is blurred, or the light intensely artificial, acidic. They are the dusty, forlorn cultivars grown on the streets of any city, but they are prize winners, too. McConnell asks with these pictures, can you find hope when and where it’s least expected?’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…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 …\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThus 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 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.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934208360660,"sku":"","price":1600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Flower-Tokyo-II-2007-30x36.7in-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-007.jpg?v=1749120500"},{"product_id":"untitled-xxvi-2022-the-horses-framed","title":"untitled XXVI, 2022 | The Horses | Framed","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eFraming spec: A140 Tulip hand painted all white Farrow and Ball | Float lay on with 16mm visible | Shadow gap | 8465 mount board | 3mm Anti-Reflect 70 glazing | Sub frame 3810TU | Split batten wall mount\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSam Anderson, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe New York Times Magazine.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/em\u003e magazine last summer, there was a sense of apocalypse in the air. The news was dominated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and energy shortages and the climate emergency. McConnell didn’t know Iceland, or its singular horses, but he took with him, he says, a couple of personal reference points for the assignment.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOne was Edwin Muir’s haunting poem The Horses, which begins: “Barely a twelvemonth after \/ The seven days war that put the world to sleep, \/ Late in the evening the strange horses came.” The other was pop shaman Bill Drummond’s belief that an interstellar ley line comes to Earth in the rifts and crags of Iceland (before later spiralling back underground outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool). McConnell was, at the very least, he told me last week, determined not to do a \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/em\u003e set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOut in the “middle of nowhere” – or more precisely, Skeiðvellir in Iceland’s Suðurland region, about 50 miles east of Reykjavík – that sense of otherworldliness was only exaggerated. McConnell was struck by a feeling that the horses, “co-creators of our world up until the Industrial Revolution”, had been somehow cast adrift. It was as if, he says, as in Muir’s poem, an unnameable disaster had happened and the horses were part of the landscape of survival. The psychedelic effects of the pictures he took were mostly produced by playing around with torches and gels – “redundant technology”. This picture is included in a book he has made of the series. He toyed with the idea of calling the volume The Pink, Yellow and Blue Riders, but in the end, he borrowed Muir’s simpler title, \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Horses\u003c\/em\u003e – symbols, as the poet wrote, of “that long-lost archaic companionship”.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTim Adams,\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2023\/jul\/23\/the-big-picture-gareth-mcconnells-icelandic-wild-horses\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2023\/jul\/23\/the-big-picture-gareth-mcconnells-icelandic-wild-horses\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Observer\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e'Leaning towards the surreal and unexpected have always been at the heart of McConnell’s practice, which self-consciously refers to the history of the medium. The horse, in particular, is an important symbol in the history of art, evoking the equestrian portraits of George Stubbs, to Eadweard Muybridge’s late 19th-century stills-in-motion. “The horse is a poignant symbol,” McConnell adds. “Historically, they represented civilisation, power and status … but in this context we might think of the impending environmental catastrophe – the end of civilisation.”'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLydia Figes,\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.anothermag.com\/art-photography\/15004\/gareth-mcconnell-s-magical-portrait-of-icelandic-horses\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.anothermag.com\/art-photography\/15004\/gareth-mcconnell-s-magical-portrait-of-icelandic-horses\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'McConnell has employed bold craft skills to make this series, which, by excluding models – humans – redistributes some species power. (McConnell has strong themes of misfit, misplaced, and outsider groups in his work.) He shines improbably glorious, cosmic lights on the horses, using colours like those associated with transformative mood experiences such as music and dance, drug use, or the bright sunlight that falls through the stained-glass window of cathedrals.  \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMcConnell addresses ideas of separation caused, mostly, by human intervention. On occasion a horse is seen in what looks an understated indoor studio context, standing on stock floor coverings and before backdrops, unsaddled, and unbridled. The visual analogy with a beautiful human is striking – lights and shadows and colours are arranged to exquisite perfection, as they would be for a model in a sumptuous advertisement, the object of which is to persuade ownership.   \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWith this series McConnell has launched the equivalent of a trillion-dollar campaign for extreme luxury goods, whose intention is not ownership, but to rewild. lt is an irony, of course, and part of our disgrace, that active human intervention for re-wilding is so necessary. Although McConnell’s campaign originates in the trans-hyphenating mythologies of Pegasus, unicorns, and centaurs, his target is prioritising the primary animal. In this way he gives value to what he says is a more ‘spiritual, expressive sphere,’ returning to horses their mystical absoluteness.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'There is also a long tradition of horses being depicted in art, from neolithic cave paintings to Muybridge and the birth of cinema. Up until the industrial revolution, horses were vital to creating, and maintaining, society - helping us work the land and transport goods. It seems emblematic and timely to publish a book at this time, as we again enter an age of rapid change with technologies, such as AI, ushering in as yet unknown shifts in our society, art, and industry.' \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.coeval-magazine.com\/coeval\/gareth-mcconnell\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.coeval-magazine.com\/coeval\/gareth-mcconnell\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCoeval \u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'I like the intervention of it. That it's very clearly a staged event. And it highlights the enchantment of the ordinary, the things we encounter daily but rarely appreciate. With my work, I'm trying to tune in to some kind of cosmic wonderment that's inherent in our surroundings, but that we pass by everyday and overlook.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/culture\/2023\/08\/03\/take-a-look-at-gareth-mcconnells-psychedelic-and-otherworldly-images-of-icelands-wild-hors\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/culture\/2023\/08\/03\/take-a-look-at-gareth-mcconnells-psychedelic-and-otherworldly-images-of-icelands-wild-hors\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eEuroNews\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'I saw this as an opportunity to commune with our most ancient companion, one of the original subjects in art,” McConnell says. To him, the image of the horse symbolises technological progress while reminding us of “humankind’s urgent responsibility to repair its lost bond with nature.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGareth McConnell,\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.creativereview.co.uk\/photography-annual-2022-gareth-mcconnell\/\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/www.creativereview.co.uk\/photography-annual-2022-gareth-mcconnell\/\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCreative Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43991804477652,"sku":"","price":2600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/The-Horses-XXVI-30x37-Framed-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1697454110"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xv-2021","title":"Dream Meadow XV, 2021","description":"\u003csection id=\"product\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv id=\"product_info\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"specs\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘It’s Springtime and it’s dark and the city sleeps. Flowers emerge in strange places and he notices the flowers and then he photographs the flowers. Medium format. Tripod. Extended exposures, no flash. Tungsten-balanced film and available street lighting. And the camera sees the flowers quite differently from the eye. It offers up a glimpse into the optical unconscious. It shows us things that we never expected to find. Things that we never expected to see.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor McConnell the sublime and the monumental and the oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful always reside in the people and the places and the things where you’d least expect to find them. In the Sectarian mural. In the Undertakers. In the Crackhouse. In the violated body. In the maligned and the marginalized. In the half-way-home. The oh-so-fucking-sad-and-beautiful. In people and places and things where you’d least expect to find it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Night Flowers are no different. They are a series of minor photographic revelations. Revelations in the sense that they reveal what the eye cannot see and what the night will not give up and what the city’s chaos and filth and concrete foreverness largely denies. They reveal a chance encounter with fragility, stillness and beauty. In the middle of a traffic island. In the shadow of a Corporate HQ. On a street in the ghetto. They offer transcendence, escapism and redemption. They reveal it where you’d least expect to find it. Colour in the dead of night.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘Flowers are, of course, deeply symbolic of renewal. Their beauty is bound up in the knowledge that it is momentary. Beauty pierces your heart because it is painful. It is about loss, transience, and wonder at its very existence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s photographs of his bed and flowers have to be understood with his other work in mind. The motivation and poignance behind the images in Meditations (2004–08), Night Flowers (2002–10), make little sense if you don’t know McConnell’s shocking and affective images in the series Anti-Social Behaviour Parts I \u0026amp; II (1995) — victims of paramilitary punishment beatings in his homeland of Northern Ireland, or IV drug users who were his friends and sometime community. This is true of beautiful things, isn’t it? Beauty is cloying and saccharine when it’s too easily granted.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMcConnell shoots Night Flowers in ambient light and with a long exposure. He takes the pictures during nocturnal walks, another temporal experience out of the workaday. Similar to the beds, the flowers become still, central objects, isolated from their context (they are not hothouse but urban flowers, growing alongside commercial strips and housing estates). In some, a spray is classically composed against a background, blossoms burgeoning; in others the image is blurred, or the light intensely artificial, acidic. They are the dusty, forlorn cultivars grown on the streets of any city, but they are prize winners, too. McConnell asks with these pictures, can you find hope when and where it’s least expected?’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘…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 …\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThus 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn 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.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePrice displayed for print only. Framed as seen, Birds Eye Sapele box framed with custom staining, lay on floated. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"desc\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"clear\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/section\u003e\n\u003csection id=\"related\"\u003e\u003c\/section\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44204547309780,"sku":"","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XV-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1743598193"},{"product_id":"butterfly-bush-i-2023","title":"Butterfly Bush I, 2023","description":"\u003cp\u003e____________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Butterfly (Buddleia) Bush is a difficult plant, regarded as unwelcome. It is a shrub that lives like a weed on waste ground and railway cuttings (and bomb sites) and is symbolic of urban decay when it makes its home in abandoned buildings. It penetrates and destroys masonry and brickwork. Specialist companies are employed to eradicate it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Butterfly (Buddleia) Bush is a much valued garden plant, with densely clustered, small, purple, lilac, red, (or sometimes white) flowers. These flowers have great beauty and are welcomed by gardeners for having a delightful honey-like fragrance, which attracts butterflies. The Butterfly Bush may be purchased from garden centres.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople can be difficult, and may be found guilty of unwelcome, anti-social behaviour. They can occupy unloved or abandoned areas, or even wealthy ones, where they harm community well-being through hurtful behaviour. Specialist agencies – police, prisons, security guards, councils and government bodies seek to manage or contain them. Paramilitary groups also enforce their own behaviour codes.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePeople are much loved by their parents, families, and relatives, and by their friends, friendship groups, and neighbours. Communities have churches, pubs, cafes, schools, clubs, and are rich in local tradition, where people are mutually supportive. Communities may be densely clustered with people of different sexes, skin colours, religious and belief systems, ages, politics, and musical tastes, and a wide variety of colourful clothing may be worn – rose, yellow, pink, blue, green, black, orange, purple, white, or sometimes psychedelic. People are valued by their communities for both their similarities and unique differences, and the deep meaning these bring to human existence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell is a photographer-artist. He grew up in the Troubles. He has been both social and anti-social in his life, and now prefers the social. He has great interest in people. McConnell’s highly coloured interpretations of natural human perfection and imperfection can be seen, in all their intensely acute power, in these photographs.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eText by Neal Brown \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45435147878612,"sku":"","price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Butterfly-Bush-I-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-2023.jpg?v=1742910683"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxv-2022-framed-edition-number-01-100","title":"Dream Blossom XXV, 2022","description":"\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eFraming spec: A140 Tulip hand painted all white Farrow and Ball | Float lay on with 16mm visible | Shadow gap | 8465 mount board | 3mm Anti-Reflect 70 glazing | Sub frame 3810TU | Split batten wall mount\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMcConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p2\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePleasure. Total. The floral. McConnell your florist\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p2\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e‘…bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement. Eschewing digital post-production techniques, McConnell achieves his heightened images when shooting, through the deft manipulation of light, movement and long exposures.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSean O’Hagan, The Observer\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"extended_description open\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlistair O’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e‘It would be remiss of me not to mention the cool psychedelia that pervades McConnell’s work over the past decade. He has gone from using the techniques of a perhaps more salutary “documentary” style and has slowly loosened his grip on those austere technicalities to assume a lack of control in focus, shutter etc. which promotes a much more free and transcendent vision, not without allegory to Brion Gysin, Kenneth Anger and perhaps the musical interludes of Psychick Youth. In suggesting this, I am suggesting a consistency in McConnell’s mid-career that is inspiring.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e'Sometimes it seems in Northern Ireland, that the fiercer the town, the more flamboyant the hanging baskets of flowers. Carrick has lots of them, swinging in the north wind.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSusan McKay, Carrickfergus, Source Magazine (2001)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45733151146196,"sku":"","price":300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXV-2022-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1729258260"},{"product_id":"at-the-edge-of-paradise-i-2022","title":"At The Edge Of Paradise I, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e_______\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eutopia and illusion\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eparadise\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eseduction\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eArtifice\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eVivid, oversaturated colours—electric blues, molten oranges, and neon pinks\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003epostcards and screens\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003enature as curated spectacle\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003ePalm trees\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003ebougainvillea\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003etropical escape\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003estill\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003ehyperreal\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003elush and excessive\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eBlack moons\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eblazing suns\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eunseen forces\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003emystery\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eabsence\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eparadise\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003econstructed\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eunreachable\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003emirage\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003evisions of Eden\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55517290889590,"sku":null,"price":4000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/At-The-Edge-Of-Paradise-I-2025-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-03.jpg?v=1749214600"},{"product_id":"to-be-free","title":"To Be Free","description":"\u003cp\u003e_________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwisted by wind and time, the Joshua tree stands as a silent oracle of the Mojave desert — once part of a living sacred world, long before settlers renamed it after a conqueror.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn that act of naming, a deeper violence took root: the remaking of an ancient land into a projection of destiny and ownership.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCalifornia was imagined as a promised land, a mirage shimmering at the edge of the American Dream.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Joshua tree, unadapted to the frequency of wildfire’s new fury, burns and fails, leaving blackened monuments in its place — witnesses to the collapse not just of ecosystems, but of illusions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these works, a flood of deep blue — the spiritual color of mourning, mystery, and of thresholds between worlds — veils the scorched landscape.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBlue alludes to what fire cannot destroy: the endurance of memory and the sacredness that survives even in ruin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSee more from the series \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/garethmcconnell.com\/projects\/to-be-free-2022\/\"\u003ehere\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55566618132854,"sku":"","price":2500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/To-Be-Free-I-Framed-Gareth-McConnell-003.jpg?v=1749116649"},{"product_id":"acid-thunder-2013","title":"Acid Thunder, 2013","description":"\u003cp\u003e_______\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe idea first came to me when I woke from a sleep on a long haul flight and looked out the window onto a crazy beautiful sunset (or a sunrise I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter really, though they are quite different visually… something to do with the particles in the evening air refracting light I think) but you know it was one of those times on a plane when all is still and dark, everyone asleep and then you open the shutter a touch and BOOM straight to the brain. That line from Bladerunner came to mind… you know when Rutger Hauer says ‘I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark…‘. It took me back to a rave south of England early nineties (Is this the way they say the futures meant to feel or just 20,000 people standing in a field. JC) when I took three purple microdots and amongst other things over the course of a long night, hid from the Viet Cong up trees in deep jungle and watched monolithic skyscrapers grow up to the stars before collapsing in on themselves turning the world inside out in a psychedelic demolition day bathed in (what I remember as… don’t you hate it when people bang on about their trips?) red and orange apocalyptic twilight. Life changer. Deep breath.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55743413977462,"sku":null,"price":1800.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Acid-Thunder-2013-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1775645725"},{"product_id":"the-krossing-holy-fool-04-2025","title":"The Krossing, 04, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn intergenerational artistic collaboration uniting K2 Plant Hire Ltd (formerly known as The KLF), Sports Banger, Chunky and Gareth McConnell. Photographed at the Pyramids of Giza during the full moon, and featured in \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-krossing\"\u003eThe Krossing\u003c\/a\u003e book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"On arrival in Egypt, the visionary aspects of the desert landscape took hold of me spontaneously, and I realised I wanted to create works that engaged with the idea of the 'Holy Fool'*\" GM\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e*The Holy Fool is a spiritual archetype found in various traditions, particularly Eastern Orthodox Christianity, who defies social norms to reveal deeper spiritual truths. Through outward eccentricity and defiance of societal expectations, the Holy Fool serves as a prophet, a truth-teller to power, and a reminder of a more beautiful and spiritual reality. They often embrace poverty, homelessness, and disruptive behavior, but their actions are symbolic and driven by an inner commitment to a higher spiritual understanding, sometimes in a way that is indirect.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cem\u003e________\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'Why would anyone be poking around the pyramids in hi-viz gear, pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks across a barren landscape? It’s a big question – perhaps dangerously big. In Gareth McConnell’s vivid and mysterious photographs from the Giza Plateau, a lone workman seems to be searching for something. What is Chunky doing out there? Is he on a pilgrimage, or a quest? Paying homage to the ancients? Raiding tombs? I’ve got an idea, but it’s too weird for an opening paragraph. Allow me to start by setting the scene. When Pharaoh Khufu ordered the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first and biggest of the three pyramids at Giza, he secured his voyage into the afterlife, where he expected to become a god. The pyramids became one of the most recognisable symbols of human civilisation. In our collective imagination – a dimension where ideas can feel as solid as physical objects – the pyramids take up a lot of space. You don’t need to have visited Giza to know what they represent: life after death. So if someone was to bootleg Khufu’s design to build their own monument, thousands of years later, and if they were to call that monument The Peoples Pyramid, then the meaning of this would, I think, be self-evident.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eChal Ravens, excerpt from The Krossing, 2025 \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56286041178486,"sku":null,"price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Gareth-McConnell-The-Krossing-04-Sorika-2025-008.jpg?v=1758031887"},{"product_id":"untitled-xxii-2022-the-horses-10x12","title":"untitled XXII, 2022 | The Horses","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s psychedelic photographs of Icelandic horses reimagine these animals not as symbols of control or nobility, but as electric, cosmic beings flickering between dream and hyperreality. Bathed in neon hues, they pulse with strange sentience, echoing art historical and literary references—from Franz Marc’s spiritual color theory to Edwin Muir’s apocalyptic steeds and Nietzsche’s Turin horse—each adding layers of meaning around freedom, chaos, and the unknowable. Set against Iceland’s mystical, volcanic landscape and resonating with the energy of interstellar ley lines, McConnell’s horses become more than animals; they are surreal messengers, blurring the boundaries between nature, myth, and the digital sublime.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'\u003cbr\u003eSam Anderson, \u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘He shines improbably glorious, cosmic lights on the horses, using colours like those associated with transformative mood experiences such as music and dance, drug use, or the bright sunlight that falls through the stained-glass window of cathedrals.’ Neal Brown, author of; Tracey Emin (Modern Art series), Tate Publishing\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57270727737718,"sku":null,"price":650.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-The-Horses-XXII-20222-001_1690b249-c5bb-488b-a631-9529d5d98e52.jpg?v=1770811575"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxvii-2025","title":"Dream Blossom XXXVII, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003e______________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI come back to the blossom year after year. They just do something to me, they are so perfect and transient and yes, poignant  - I was reminded the other day about a few lines in an interview I did with \u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e regarding a publication I made in 2024 called \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-stop\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Stop\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e where along side a specially commissioned text by Iphgenia Baal I juxtaposed blossom works with redacted portraits of young people protesting at the Stop the War in Iraq march in 2003. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“When I first looked at [the photographs], those kids were in their full bloom, it’s such a transient moment. All the flowers pictured in the book are cherry blossoms, which is a well-noted embodiment of mortality, it symbolises both life and death, beauty and violence. So I suppose it was just a kind of mirroring of that life cycle, that hopefully we all have the chance to bloom and to wilt and to fall from the branch and go back into the eternal cycle. But to be able to fulfil that cycle is a great privilege..”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese newly available framed works are priced low not because I think they are without value, they are priced low as I would like them to be reasonably accessible so that they may get out into the world and on some walls. Get one of these up there as a reminder that despite it all the world is full of wonder and that if you have money to spend on a piece of printed paper in some metal and glass you are one of the lucky ones, and that even with that luck that this is over quick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAlthough this item is an open edition it may only be available for a short time. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57608999731574,"sku":null,"price":350.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXXVII-2026-Gareth-McConnell-001.jpg?v=1775227026"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxvii-2025-copy","title":"Dream Blossom XXXVII, 2025","description":"\u003cp\u003e______________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI come back to the blossom year after year. They just do something to me, they are so perfect and transient and yes, poignant  - I was reminded the other day about a few lines in an interview I did with \u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e regarding a publication I made in 2024 called \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-stop\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Stop\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e where along side a specially commissioned text by Iphgenia Baal I juxtaposed blossom works with redacted portraits of young people protesting at the Stop the War in Iraq march in 2003. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“When I first looked at [the photographs], those kids were in their full bloom, it’s such a transient moment. All the flowers pictured in the book are cherry blossoms, which is a well-noted embodiment of mortality, it symbolises both life and death, beauty and violence. So I suppose it was just a kind of mirroring of that life cycle, that hopefully we all have the chance to bloom and to wilt and to fall from the branch and go back into the eternal cycle. But to be able to fulfil that cycle is a great privilege..”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese newly available framed works are priced low not because I think they are without value, they are priced low as I would like them to be reasonably accessible so that they may get out into the world and on some walls. Get one of these up there as a reminder that despite it all the world is full of wonder and that if you have money to spend on a piece of printed paper in some metal and glass you are one of the lucky ones, and that even with that luck that this is over quick.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAlthough this item is an open edition it may only be available for a short time. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57609108128118,"sku":null,"price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXXVII-2026-Gareth-McConnell-002_9d73aeb9-d047-44af-a785-22815030c627.jpg?v=1775229827"}],"url":"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/framed-works.oembed","provider":"Sorika","version":"1.0","type":"link"}