{"title":"Limited Edition","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xxiv-2021","title":"Dream Meadow XXIV, 2021","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThis ones crackers.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNo DMT required.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBut u know buyers choice an all\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSit down in front of this baby and hear the great I am breath and whisper the glory of all that is and has been.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI ain’t going to Marz\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOr Goa\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhat a track\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMade locally\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\"\u003ewith an artist: a mind not starving\/hysterical\/naked destroyed by alcohol and drugs, violent sectarianism, sarcasm, or lurid gummy sweets, but who practices an intense ardour – a rapture with the city and its urban plant life, including the city’s fine florists whose high raptures with the floral make visible an ecstasy . . . a light show of psychotropic incandescence, multi-coloured, intravenous inks, delirious registration slippages, whose flower perfume dominates the residual Charles Manson faecal smell in the flower soil, or the daintily rotten, discoloured water\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e(folk culture and rural traditions have traditionally assigned symbolic meaning to flowers, such as Gardenia meaning: Ecstasy (MDMA)\/Acid House and Rave\/objective quantitative colour information of MDMA using visible hyper-spectral imaging\/florid red faced from dancing\/water intoxication\/cerebral oedema)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43067959083220,"sku":"","price":700.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/006-Dream-Meadow-XXIV-2021-Gareth-McConnell.jpg?v=1669371831"},{"product_id":"night-flower-tokyo-iv-2007","title":"Night Flower (Tokyo IV), 2007","description":"\u003cp\u003e__________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s \u003cem\u003eNight Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eNight Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e—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 \u003cem\u003eVitamin Ph: New Perspectives on Photography\u003c\/em\u003e, Night Flowers offers a poetic meditation on survival, light, and the unexpected places where beauty persists.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\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 \u003cem\u003eNight Flowers \u003c\/em\u003eare 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.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eREADMORE\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 \u003cem\u003eMeditations\u003c\/em\u003e (2004–08), \u003cem\u003eNight Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e (2002–10), make little sense if you don’t know McConnell’s shocking and affective images in the series \u003cem\u003eAnti-Social Behaviour Parts I \u0026amp; II\u003c\/em\u003e (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 \u003cem\u003eNight Flowers\u003c\/em\u003e 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\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\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, \u003cem\u003eGareth McConnell, Contemporary Photographers\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43067960328404,"sku":"","price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Flower-Tokyo-IV-2007-30-x-36-002XX.jpg?v=1749134193"},{"product_id":"untitled-i-2022-the-horses","title":"untitled I, 2022 | The Horses","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSam Anderson, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the \u003cem\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\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/em\u003e set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eThe Horses\u003c\/em\u003e – symbols, as the poet wrote, of “that long-lost archaic companionship”.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTim Adams, \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\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003eLydia Figes, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.anothermag.com\/art-photography\/15004\/gareth-mcconnell-s-magical-portrait-of-icelandic-horses\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.coeval-magazine.com\/coeval\/gareth-mcconnell\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCoeval \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eEuroNews\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.creativereview.co.uk\/photography-annual-2022-gareth-mcconnell\/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCreative Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43485365207252,"sku":"10","price":2200.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Untitled-I-The-Horses-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-30x36.9-inch-003.jpg?v=1668866157"},{"product_id":"untitled-xv-2022-the-horses","title":"untitled XV, 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, The New York Times Magazine\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\u0026amp;nbsp;Tracey Emin (Modern Art series), Tate Publishing\u0026amp;nbsp;\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The Horses is a beautiful, candy-colored acid trip of a book.'\u003cbr\u003eThe Ten Best Photography Books of 2023\u003cbr\u003eJeff Campagna, Smithsonian Magazine\u003cbr\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43494674399444,"sku":"","price":2500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Untitled-XV-The-Horses-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1742569097"},{"product_id":"untitled-iv-the-horses","title":"untitled IV | The Horses, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSam Anderson, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\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 \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43494772506836,"sku":"","price":7500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/untitled-IV-The-Horses-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1669226515"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xiii-2021","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.\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\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\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\"\u003eREADMORE\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’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43496494563540,"sku":"","price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XIII-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-003.jpg?v=1749136634"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xxvii-2021","title":"Dream Meadow XXVII, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e \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\"\u003ewith an artist: a mind not starving\/hysterical\/naked destroyed by alcohol and drugs, violent sectarianism, sarcasm, or lurid gummy sweets, but who practices an intense ardour – a rapture with the city and its urban plant life, including the city’s fine florists\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ewhose high raptures with the floral make visible an ecstasy . . . a light show of psychotropic incandescence, multi-coloured, intravenous inks, delirious registration slippages, whose flower perfume dominates the residual Charles Manson faecal smell in the flower soil, or the daintily rotten, discoloured water\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e(folk culture and rural traditions have traditionally assigned symbolic meaning to flowers, such as Gardenia meaning: Ecstasy (MDMA)\/Acid House and Rave\/objective quantitative colour information of MDMA using visible hyper-spectral imaging\/florid red faced from dancing\/water intoxication\/cerebral oedema)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43496518025428,"sku":"","price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Meadow-XXVII-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-30x38-Ed-10-002.jpg?v=1743603212"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xiii","title":"Dream Meadow XIII, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e22\/33 next number\u003cbr\u003eLast one at this price\u003c\/p\u003e\n\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.\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\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\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\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’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43496793178324,"sku":"","price":500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XIII-2021-12-x-15-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1777374808"},{"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":"dream-blossom-xiii-2022","title":"Dream Blossom XIII, 2021","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAs I waited under a tree one night\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWaiting being the operative\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWaiting waiting always waiting\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd this fella he says to me\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhat about these meetings then\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd I say yeah they good\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBut there is an exquisite beauty in\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe pain of all this\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLike stinging sex blossom\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e(To paraphrase the famous one\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePatron saint of)\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThat cannot be underestimated\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd when you there you really there\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd it really is\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnother world\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd you wonder will you ever walk with\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNormal folk again\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOr if you even\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWant to\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd as you look up at the blossom overhead\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA little flicker in the chest\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe big joke\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI always loved the flower burst\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe rose in the stem\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLife and death in one\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThat beautiful signal of success\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43498436395220,"sku":"","price":1750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Blossom-XIII-2021-30x40-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1749214436"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xiv-2021","title":"Dream Blossom XIV, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’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=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\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 \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\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, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43498530701524,"sku":"","price":3000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/DreamBlossomXIV2021GarethMcConnellSorilka001.jpg?v=1749214676"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xiv-2021","title":"Dream Meadow XIV, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s \u003cem\u003eDream Meadow\u003c\/em\u003e works 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 the \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, The Observer\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\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’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\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\"\u003eSusan McKay, Carrickfergus, Source Magazine (2001)\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43505780064468,"sku":"","price":1100.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/Dream-Meadow-XIV-2021-19.5x24-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1669732758"},{"product_id":"untitled-xxii-2022-the-horses","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, The New York Times Magazine\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\u0026amp;nbsp;Tracey Emin (Modern Art series), Tate Publishing\u0026amp;nbsp;\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43526192333012,"sku":"","price":900.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/untitled-XXII-The-Horses-19.5x24-Ed-17-Gareth-McConnell-002.jpg?v=1770811575"},{"product_id":"untitled-iv-2022-the-horses","title":"untitled IV, 2022 | The Horses","description":"\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\u003eGareth McConnell’s psychedelic Icelandic horse photographs crack open the traditional image of the horse—majestic, controlled, subservient—and rewire it into something more cosmic, more electric. Bathed in hallucinatory hues, his horses seem to flicker between worlds, existing somewhere between dream and hyper-reality, between the ancient and the digital age. Their glowing manes and spectral eyes pulse with a strange sentience, as if they’ve galloped straight out of a vision or a fever dream.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn art history, the horse is a shifting symbol: from the noble war steeds of Renaissance paintings to the color-charged emotional intensity of Franz Marc’s Blue Horse. Marc, a founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that color could transcend its visual properties to communicate deeper emotional and spiritual truths. In his color theory, Marc assigned distinct emotional qualities to different colors—blue representing the spiritual and the divine, yellow the playful and the joyful, and red symbolizing the violent and the earthly. This use of color in Marc’s work provides an important parallel to McConnell’s psychedelic horses, where bright, neon hues create a sense of hyperreality, transforming the horses from earthly creatures into symbolic vessels of chaos and freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEdwin Muir’s poem The Horses reimagines them as eerie, almost supernatural survivors of an apocalyptic silence—ancient forces returning to a world that has destroyed itself. McConnell’s horses echo this eerie return, vibrating with the kind of strange, prophetic energy that suggests they know something we don’t.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen there’s the myth of Nietzsche’s Turin horse, as told by Milan Kundera—a moment of tragic poetry in which the philosopher, upon witnessing a beaten carriage horse, collapses in grief, embracing the animal before descending into madness. It’s a fable of human fragility, of the unbearable weight of witnessing suffering. McConnell himself has said he sees horses as “a symbol of chaos, freedom, and something unknowable and unpredictable at the edge of consciousness.” His images bring that vision to life, transforming these creatures into luminous, almost digital entities. They aren’t just captured; they seem to stare back, dissolving the boundary between human and animal, dream and waking, past and future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe setting of Iceland adds yet another layer of mysticism and isolation to McConnell’s horses. The raw, volcanic landscape of the island, with its otherworldly terrain and stark beauty, creates an almost spiritual backdrop that seems to charge these creatures with an energy that is both ancient and futuristic. Iceland’s geographic remoteness has long been a place of myth and legend, and in some ways, McConnell’s horses are part of that narrative—a link between the primal forces of nature and the unknown.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis connection to the mystical is further amplified by the influence of Bill Drummond’s theory of interstellar ley lines—those invisible currents of energy that supposedly run through the Earth’s surface, linking sacred sites and cosmic forces. Drummond, in his exploration of these lines, suggests that certain places on Earth, like Iceland, resonate with a unique energy that can influence both physical and spiritual realms. McConnell’s horses seem to exist in that space where ley lines intersect, embodying the energy of the land itself—chaotic, mysterious, and full of potential. His horses are more than just animals; they are symbols of a greater cosmic order, a connection between the earth, the stars, and the human consciousness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the \u003cem\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\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/em\u003e set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eThe Horses\u003c\/em\u003e – symbols, as the poet wrote, of “that long-lost archaic companionship”.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTim Adams,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2023\/jul\/23\/the-big-picture-gareth-mcconnells-icelandic-wild-horses\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003eLydia Figes,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.anothermag.com\/art-photography\/15004\/gareth-mcconnell-s-magical-portrait-of-icelandic-horses\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\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\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\u003eNeal Brown\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.coeval-magazine.com\/coeval\/gareth-mcconnell\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCoeval \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eEuroNews\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eGareth McConnell,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.creativereview.co.uk\/photography-annual-2022-gareth-mcconnell\/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCreative Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43573288534228,"sku":"","price":1000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/products\/untitled-IV-The-Horses-2022-19.5x24-in-Ed-17-Product-001.jpg?v=1749203780"},{"product_id":"evocation-iv-forest-fayre-1993-2020","title":"Evocation IV, (Forest Fayre, 1993), 2020","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eForest Fayre\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTunch is out to lunch\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLaughter\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMore laughter\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWe are moving too fast\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNo way out\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMushroom wine\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOmmmz Red Dragons\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHotknives in curling tongs\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMatt and Pat in the back seat\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBeautiful Pat, long dead now\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAnd I still miss you my brother\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSitting on the hill\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eValley far below\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eClouds churning past\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThat couple dancing\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLike royalty in exile\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eA naked golden man rides by on white horse\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNo one bats an eye\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe earth thumps\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThose beautiful people dancing\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eInside\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe ring of fire\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMaybe\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThey found\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTheir hearts desire\u003c\/span\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43754814144724,"sku":"","price":400.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Evocation-IV-_Forest-Fayre-1993_-2020-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1682434946"},{"product_id":"the-tears-of-things-xi-2020","title":"The Tears of Things XI, 2020","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe blossom arrives\u003cbr\u003eMore beautiful than before\u003cbr\u003eThey say this happens as you age\u003cbr\u003eIt’s kinda unfathomable in its beauty\u003cbr\u003eI cant get my head round it\u003cbr\u003eI look I touch I smell\u003cbr\u003eSome years I photograph\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLondon 2001\u003cbr\u003eI had just come back\u003cbr\u003eFrom a little stay on the coast\u003cbr\u003eNow a different man\u003cbr\u003e(for a while anyways)\u003cbr\u003eI remember looking up\u003cbr\u003eAt this explosion of pink\u003cbr\u003eUnder the streetlights\u003cbr\u003eGlowing like an alien brain\u003cbr\u003eAnd asking myself how had I not\u003cbr\u003eNoticed this before\u003cbr\u003eHow?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNight Flowers\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTokyo 2004\u003cbr\u003eLand of the blossom lovers\u003cbr\u003eFor real\u003cbr\u003eAt night I walked in a bubble\u003cbr\u003eOf my own otherness\u003cbr\u003eMy attention not punctured by recognition\u003cbr\u003eOf language either spoken or written\u003cbr\u003eAnd these are Blackberry days\u003cbr\u003eNo smartphone fire fly pollution\u003cbr\u003eWe will not know those days again\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOne night jet lagged\u003cbr\u003eI taxi to the fish market\u003cbr\u003eAnd if ever I saw one thing\u003cbr\u003eIn my life that said\u003cbr\u003eThis cannot go on\u003cbr\u003eThis was it\u003cbr\u003eLike every fish in the sea\u003cbr\u003eHad been caught\u003cbr\u003eAnd was there that morning\u003cbr\u003eAnd every other morning\u003cbr\u003eI shed a tear into my sushi\u003cbr\u003eBut I digress\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNew York\u003cbr\u003eEarly 2008 I think\u003cbr\u003eMy heart wasn’t in it\u003cbr\u003eToo much on my mind\u003cbr\u003eI did have a nice moon lit moment\u003cbr\u003eTo myself in Central Park\u003cbr\u003eBut no real keepers\u003cbr\u003eJust some bad behaviour and\u003cbr\u003eMore regrets\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSydney 2010\u003cbr\u003eReverted to type\u003cbr\u003eLeave a party off my face\u003cbr\u003eTo find the flowers\u003cbr\u003eI had noticed\u003cbr\u003eOn the journey there\u003cbr\u003eI stand in the road\u003cbr\u003eTripod camera light meter\u003cbr\u003eThe warm breeze and fragrance\u003cbr\u003eAnd self hatred\u003cbr\u003eAnd cars swerving\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLondon\u003cbr\u003eThis year\u003cbr\u003eThe year of the plague\u003cbr\u003e2020\u003cbr\u003eIn this different world\u003cbr\u003eWe are now living in\u003cbr\u003eThe collective confrontation with mortality\u003cbr\u003eA world of masks\u003cbr\u003eAnd queues outside Lidl across the road\u003cbr\u003eAnd the blossom always told us\u003cbr\u003eThis was a brief dance\u003cbr\u003eThat we all must fall as petals to the floor\u003cbr\u003eBut not like this\u003cbr\u003eReally?\u003cbr\u003eAnd the blossom says I told you\u003cbr\u003eThat life may be eternal\u003cbr\u003eThe expressions of life however\u003cbr\u003eAre not\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePolaroid circa 1990s\u003cbr\u003eHence the blue\u003cbr\u003eBlue blue blue\u003cbr\u003eDye levels faded with age\u003cbr\u003eFilm from a different world.\u003cbr\u003eA full colour spectrum world of promise\u003cbr\u003ePromise and lies and hope and denial\u003cbr\u003eMamiya RZ67 and polaroid back\u003cbr\u003eA camera system originally\u003cbr\u003eDesigned for commercial use\u003cbr\u003eTo tell the lies that needed to be told\u003cbr\u003eLies I’ve helped to tell\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Tears of Things\u003cbr\u003e‘the pathos of things’\u003cbr\u003e‘An empathy towards things’\u003cbr\u003e‘A sensitivity to ephemera’\u003cbr\u003e‘the quietly elated, bittersweet feeling of\u003cbr\u003ehaving been witness to the dazzling circus of\u003cbr\u003elife – knowing that none of it can last’\u003cbr\u003e*Wikipedia\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\u003cbr\u003eVitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43754829709524,"sku":"","price":1000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/The-Tears-of-Things-XI-2020-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1682436049"},{"product_id":"presence-xvii-2017","title":"Presence XVII, 2017","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s Presence series captures bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLight in McConnell’s work is both revelation and erasure. The overexposed bodies appear weightless, as if dissolving into their surroundings, while the void presses in at the edges, a darkness that feels just as consuming as the light. This tension—between presence and absence, rapture and fragility—imbues the images with a quiet unease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn these works, we are left hovering alongside the figures, held in the space between ascension and oblivion. The raised hands do not offer answers, only the silent question of what comes next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘In all likelihood, The Dream Meadow is a fabrication of bodies photographed on a stage, perhaps even production stills from an unknown Macbeth. They are assembled in such a way that makes one consider their genesis in their abundance and togetherness in front of McConnell’s lens, but after a cursory examination, the “who’s” of the matter dissipate into the “why’s”. There remains an air of ritual in the work, the frames feel tremulous and recall the British folk tradition of Pagan Horror that made their way through the 70s and 80s via Hammer and other “weird folk Britania” outlets. There is nothing horrific per se here, but the indulgence of witchery, herbal psychedelia and pagan tribalism are apparent. It could be a by-product of Gareth’s age and interests, but obliquely I suspect that there is a precise interest in using the body and its movements as a stalwart against the state.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/americansuburbx.com\/2020\/02\/gareth-mcconnell-the-dream-meadow.html\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43754843144404,"sku":"","price":1750.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Presence-XVII-2017-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1743077865"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxv-grid-2023","title":"Dream Blossom XXV, Grid, 2023","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\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":43880892465364,"sku":"","price":450.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXV-GRID-2023-Gareth-McConnell-004.jpg?v=1691161836"},{"product_id":"night-meadow-vi-2019","title":"Night Meadow VI, 2019","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Dream Meadow is the refutation of the doldrums of contemporary life and the belief system that embodies it. It is the collusion of lithe and nimble-bodied tribes perfumed and bent, their rictus bearing the hallmarks and modern traits of ritual abandon – a rejection of the now through perspiration and callous cavorting. Each grimace mustered is a silent exaltation of a performed escape. The Dream Meadow is alive. Its sing song affectation prefers the ear drums of taloned youth – it resounds throughout space like a lost echo of a missed past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43895878418644,"sku":"","price":2500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/006-Night-Meadow-VI-2019.jpg?v=1692094668"},{"product_id":"night-meadow-iv-2019","title":"Night Meadow IV, 2019","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_______________\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Dream Meadow is the refutation of the doldrums of contemporary life and the belief system that embodies it. It is the collusion of lithe and nimble-bodied tribes perfumed and bent, their rictus bearing the hallmarks and modern traits of ritual abandon – a rejection of the now through perspiration and callous cavorting. Each grimace mustered is a silent exaltation of a performed escape. The Dream Meadow is alive. Its sing song affectation prefers the ear drums of taloned youth – it resounds throughout space like a lost echo of a missed past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934195122388,"sku":"","price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Meadow-IV-2019-Gareth-McConnell-48.5-x-60.5-Ed-6-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1694527965"},{"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":"presence-iii-2018","title":"Presence III, 2018","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s photographs capture bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e‘In all likelihood, The Dream Meadow is a fabrication of bodies photographed on a stage, perhaps even production stills from an unknown Macbeth. They are assembled in such a way that makes one consider their genesis in their abundance and togetherness in front of McConnell’s lens, but after a cursory examination, the “who’s” of the matter dissipate into the “why’s”. There remains an air of ritual in the work, the frames feel tremulous and recall the British folk tradition of Pagan Horror that made their way through the 70s and 80s via Hammer and other “weird folk Brittania” outlets. There is nothing horrific per se here, but the indulgence of witchery, herbal psychedelia and pagan tribalism are apparent. It could be a by-product of Gareth’s age and interests, but obliquely I suspect that there is a precise interest in using the body and its movements as a stalwart against the state.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/americansuburbx.com\/2020\/02\/gareth-mcconnell-the-dream-meadow.html\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934228185300,"sku":"","price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Presence-III-2019-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001XX_69e4fe4e-9373-4e78-bc61-a03254f3a8d3.jpg?v=1744198413"},{"product_id":"night-meadow-iv-2020","title":"Night Meadow IV, 2019","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_______________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eFrom\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-dream-meadow\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\" data-mce-href=\"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/all\/products\/the-dream-meadow\"\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Dream Meadow\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_______________\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Dream Meadow is the refutation of the doldrums of contemporary life and the belief system that embodies it. It is the collusion of lithe and nimble-bodied tribes perfumed and bent, their rictus bearing the hallmarks and modern traits of ritual abandon – a rejection of the now through perspiration and callous cavorting. Each grimace mustered is a silent exaltation of a performed escape. The Dream Meadow is alive. Its sing song affectation prefers the ear drums of taloned youth – it resounds throughout space like a lost echo of a missed past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"extended_description open\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934241063124,"sku":"","price":500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-Night-Meadow-IV-2019.jpg?v=1694532795"},{"product_id":"presence-xxii-2021","title":"Presence XXII, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s Presence series captures bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLight in McConnell’s work is both revelation and erasure. The overexposed bodies appear weightless, as if dissolving into their surroundings, while the void presses in at the edges, a darkness that feels just as consuming as the light. This tension—between presence and absence, rapture and fragility—imbues the images with a quiet unease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn these works, we are left hovering alongside the figures, held in the space between ascension and oblivion. The raised hands do not offer answers, only the silent question of what comes next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\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’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934247420116,"sku":"","price":1200.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/002-Presence-XXII-2021-Gareth-McConnell.jpg?v=1694534943"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xii-2021","title":"Dream Blossom XII, 2021","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\u003eworks 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\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, \u003cem\u003eAperture\u003c\/em\u003e 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 | \u003cem\u003eAmerican Suburbs X\u003c\/em\u003e\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","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43934287167700,"sku":"","price":2250.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XII-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1747740892"},{"product_id":"dream-baby-dream-i-2020","title":"Dream Baby Dream (I), 2020","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e___________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eFrom a conversation with Atmos Magazine\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhat inspired you to tell this particular story?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI guess its just another take on themes I’m always trying to reference in my work – the fleeting nature of life, the desire to transcend, religiosity, the possibility of change, suffering, death, the exultation of nature, human folly, overconsumption, destruction… the death spiral of capitalism – all that good stuff! On a more objective level I just wanted to make something new but that had as little impact as possible, that I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything other than buy some stuff on eBay (in this case butterflies and expired 1990’s polaroid) and go across the road to my studio and put my headphones on, listen to some good music and see what comes out.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eHow do butterflies encapsulate flourish\/collapse in your eyes?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI think butterflies are a particularly potent symbol for the environmental crisis of this time. They have fascinated man from time immemorial and across cultures, one aspect of that, the parable of the life cycle – we are born, then as caterpillar, the insatiable worm toiling on earth, then the chrysalis as death, the coffin, then the butterfly as the resurrection or reemergence in an afterlife. So whether you want to read that in a religious or scientific context it is by nature a cycle, the hope is that it goes round and round endlessly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSo they are symbolic of hope and renewal but simultaneously there is also a long tradition of butterflies representing darker forces of temptation, destruction and death. It seems like that could be the reading we also need to pay attention to now, the dark messenger, the prospect of the end of that life cycle completely, the spirit crushed, the end, and not just for the butterfly or the insect or the bee, or that orangutan we have all seen on Instagram but all of us because we are of course inextricably interlinked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhat do we have to learn from these creatures and their extinction?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI should make it clear that these photographs are not literal documentation, in the sense that these I have no idea to their conservation status or even individual names. I bought them as antique collections on eBay. I am a total layman in terms of lepidopterology (the study of moths and butterflies). What I’m thinking about is more subjective, as in the butterfly representing the natural world, a metaphor for the material expression of the endless creative mind of evolution, nature, God (perfect or imperfect creator) whatever you want to call it. I’m just looking myself and asking you to look, and to ask yourself what an amazing, intricate and unknowable place this earth is, how amazing, intricate and unknowable these creatures are, how amazing, intricate and unknowable a creature you are, we are, the symphony of life, the beautiful struggle, what are you gonna do to help, not that I think it will make any difference, its just (as the man said) a sad poem.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhat does metamorphosis mean to you?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSalvation is present in every one of us\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43953598169300,"sku":"","price":300.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/dream-baby-dream-I-2020-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-003.jpg?v=1766157893"},{"product_id":"evocation-v-2021","title":"Evocation V, 2021","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e________________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eForest Fayre\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTunch is out to lunch\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLaughter\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMore laughter\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWe are moving too fast\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNo way out\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMushroom wine\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eOmmmz Red Dragons\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eHotknives in curling tongs\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMatt and Pat in the back seat\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBeautiful Pat, long dead now\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd I still miss you my brother\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSitting on the hill\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eValley far below\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eClouds churning past\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThat couple dancing\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eLike royalty in exile\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA naked golden man rides by on white horse\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNo one bats an eye\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe earth thumps\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThose beautiful people dancing\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eInside\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe ring of fire\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMaybe\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThey found\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTheir hearts desire\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43953719705812,"sku":"","price":200.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Evocation-V-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-003.jpg?v=1695917763"},{"product_id":"dream-baby-dream-i-2021","title":"Dream Baby Dream (I), 2020","description":"\u003cp\u003e_______\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEdition number 04\/06 at this price\u003cbr\u003e_______\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom a conversation with Atmos Magazine\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat inspired you to tell this particular story?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI guess its just another take on themes I’m always trying to reference in my work – the fleeting nature of life, the desire to transcend, religiosity, the possibility of change, suffering, death, the exultation of nature, human folly, overconsumption, destruction… the death spiral of capitalism – all that good stuff! On a more objective level I just wanted to make something new but that had as little impact as possible, that I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything other than buy some stuff on eBay (in this case butterflies and expired 1990’s polaroid) and go across the road to my studio and put my headphones on, listen to some good music and see what comes out.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHow do butterflies encapsulate flourish\/collapse in your eyes?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI think butterflies are a particularly potent symbol for the environmental crisis of this time. They have fascinated man from time immemorial and across cultures, one aspect of that, the parable of the life cycle – we are born, then as caterpillar, the insatiable worm toiling on earth, then the chrysalis as death, the coffin, then the butterfly as the resurrection or reemergence in an afterlife. So whether you want to read that in a religious or scientific context it is by nature a cycle, the hope is that it goes round and round endlessly.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSo they are symbolic of hope and renewal but simultaneously there is also a long tradition of butterflies representing darker forces of temptation, destruction and death. It seems like that could be the reading we also need to pay attention to now, the dark messenger, the prospect of the end of that life cycle completely, the spirit crushed, the end, and not just for the butterfly or the insect or the bee, or that orangutan we have all seen on Instagram but all of us because we are of course inextricably interlinked.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat do we have to learn from these creatures and their extinction?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eI should make it clear that these photographs are not literal documentation, in the sense that these I have no idea to their conservation status or even individual names. I bought them as antique collections on eBay. I am a total layman in terms of lepidopterology (the study of moths and butterflies). What I’m thinking about is more subjective, as in the butterfly representing the natural world, a metaphor for the material expression of the endless creative mind of evolution, nature, God (perfect or imperfect creator) whatever you want to call it. I’m just looking myself and asking you to look, and to ask yourself what an amazing, intricate and unknowable place this earth is, how amazing, intricate and unknowable these creatures are, how amazing, intricate and unknowable a creature you are, we are, the symphony of life, the beautiful struggle, what are you gonna do to help, not that I think it will make any difference, its just (as the man said) a sad poem.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat does metamorphosis mean to you?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSalvation is present in every one of us\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43967687917780,"sku":"","price":600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Baby-Dream-_I_-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-2020-003x.jpg?v=1766158017"},{"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":"untitled-xxvi-2022-the-horses-framed-1","title":"untitled XXVI, 2022 | The Horses","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\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\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eTracey Emin (Modern Art series), Tate Publishing \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43992015012052,"sku":"","price":450.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/XXVI-untitled-The-Horses-10x8-Framed-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-004.jpg?v=1743073835"},{"product_id":"night-flower-tokyo-ix-pink-pixel-2007","title":"Night Flower (Tokyo IX), (Pink Pixel), 2007","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e__________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eCerulean Tower\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e37 floor or so\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe toilet talking to me\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMarlboros and diet coke massive bed\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd lap top and dread lonely looking out\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAcross eternal roof tops looking for love\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003ePop stars at breakfast\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSmiles in the lift\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAt least we know our good dumb luck\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eTaxi automatic door driver as lost as me\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWill I ever comeback\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd that fucking subway\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMeet me by the blossom by the river she said\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eWhich made zero sense to me\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBy the bridge down from the subway\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e20 paces Mickey Ds cross the road\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eDown the alley I chickened out\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMore smiles in the lift different this time\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBut walking round down the path that night\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNo voices I could understand\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAnd beauty pouring like a cartoon rainbow into my eyes\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eI think I might have heard\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eA whisper of myself\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eGM, 2021\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\"\u003eREADMORE\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44048069722324,"sku":"","price":600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Flower-Tokyo-IX-Pink-Pixel-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-003_65260ea3-44b1-46ed-8df5-481c19d032ec.jpg?v=1749123226"},{"product_id":"dior-flower-2018","title":"Dior Flower, 2018","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_________\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003cbr\u003e_________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e'Gareth 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\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e_________\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eBTW… this one is an outtake from a commission for Parfums Dior shot in the rose gardens at The Château de La Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s former residence in the south of France.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44054989603028,"sku":"","price":500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dior-Flower-2018-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1698838068"},{"product_id":"presence-xii-2017","title":"Presence XII, 2017","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s \u003cem\u003ePresence\u003c\/em\u003e series captures bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLight in McConnell’s work is both revelation and erasure. The overexposed bodies appear weightless, as if dissolving into their surroundings, while the void presses in at the edges, a darkness that feels just as consuming as the light. This tension—between presence and absence, rapture and fragility—imbues the images with a quiet unease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn these works, we are left hovering alongside the figures, held in the space between ascension and oblivion. The raised hands do not offer answers, only the silent question of what comes next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e________\u003c\/span\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’Neil, Aperture\u003cbr\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburb X\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44055000056020,"sku":"","price":600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Presence-XII-2017-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-005_b27e2ff0-023c-4d99-8f9e-b4c770accb14.jpg?v=1742988040"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xvii-2021","title":"Dream Meadow XVII, 2021","description":"\u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\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\"\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\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlistair O’Neil, Aperture\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburb X\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44123403092180,"sku":"","price":1000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XVII-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-005.jpg?v=1700658246"},{"product_id":"untitled-ii-2022-the-horses","title":"untitled II, 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, The New York Times Magazine\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\u0026amp;nbsp;Tracey Emin (Modern Art series), Tate Publishing\u0026amp;nbsp;\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'The Horses is a beautiful, candy-colored acid trip of a book.'\u003cbr\u003eThe Ten Best Photography Books of 2023\u003cbr\u003eJeff Campagna, Smithsonian Magazine\u003cbr\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44126485971156,"sku":"","price":900.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/untitled-II-The-Horses-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-002.jpg?v=1700755715"},{"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":"copy-of-dream-meadow-xxxv-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XXXV, 2022","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\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\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ePleasure. Total. The floral. McConnell your florist\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p2\"\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\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\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","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44380221702356,"sku":null,"price":500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XXV-2022-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001_f33a279c-c958-47e9-853c-d833770ecbac.jpg?v=1707217368"},{"product_id":"presence-xxvi-2018","title":"Presence XXVI, 2018","description":"\u003cp\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s \u003cem\u003ePresence\u003c\/em\u003e series captures bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLight in McConnell’s work is both revelation and erasure. The overexposed bodies appear weightless, as if dissolving into their surroundings, while the void presses in at the edges, a darkness that feels just as consuming as the light. This tension—between presence and absence, rapture and fragility—imbues the images with a quiet unease.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn these works, we are left hovering alongside the figures, held in the space between ascension and oblivion. The raised hands do not offer answers, only the silent question of what comes next.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e________\u003c\/span\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’Neil, Aperture\u003cbr\u003e________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eBrad Feuerhelm, American Suburb X\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44397075955924,"sku":"","price":600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Presence-XXVI-2018-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-004_0b01007d-998e-427e-a36a-2efa1c754381.jpg?v=1742987012"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xxiv-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XXIV, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis ones crackers.\u003cbr\u003eNo DMT required.\u003cbr\u003eBut u know buyers choice an all\u003cbr\u003eSit down in front of this baby and hear the great I am breath and whisper the glory of all that is and has been.\u003cbr\u003eI ain’t going to Marz\u003cbr\u003eOr Goa\u003cbr\u003eWhat a track\u003cbr\u003eMade locally\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ewith an artist: a mind not starving\/hysterical\/naked destroyed by alcohol and drugs, violent sectarianism, sarcasm, or lurid gummy sweets, but who practices an intense ardour – a rapture with the city and its urban plant life, including the city’s fine florists whose high raptures with the floral make visible an ecstasy . . . a light show of psychotropic incandescence, multi-coloured, intravenous inks, delirious registration slippages, whose flower perfume dominates the residual Charles Manson faecal smell in the flower soil, or the daintily rotten, discoloured water\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(folk culture and rural traditions have traditionally assigned symbolic meaning to flowers, such as Gardenia meaning: Ecstasy (MDMA)\/Acid House and Rave\/objective quantitative colour information of MDMA using visible hyper-spectral imaging\/florid red faced from dancing\/water intoxication\/cerebral oedema)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45001479848148,"sku":"","price":2000.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/004-Dream-Meadow-XXIV-2021-Gareth-McConnell_fc9968a4-429b-46e8-8da5-82433d015638.jpg?v=1749121548"},{"product_id":"dream-meadow-xxvii-2022","title":"Dream Meadow XXVII, 2021","description":"\u003cp\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ewith an artist: a mind not starving\/hysterical\/naked destroyed by alcohol and drugs, violent sectarianism, sarcasm, or lurid gummy sweets, but who practices an intense ardour – a rapture with the city and its urban plant life, including the city’s fine florists whose high raptures with the floral make visible an ecstasy . . . a light show of psychotropic incandescence, multi-coloured, intravenous inks, delirious registration slippages, whose flower perfume dominates the residual Charles Manson faecal smell in the flower soil, or the daintily rotten, discoloured water\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e(folk culture and rural traditions have traditionally assigned symbolic meaning to flowers, such as Gardenia meaning: Ecstasy (MDMA)\/Acid House and Rave\/objective quantitative colour information of MDMA using visible hyper-spectral imaging\/florid red faced from dancing\/water intoxication\/cerebral oedema)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNeal Brown, 2021\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_________\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003cbr\u003e_________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e'Gareth 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\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45027140239572,"sku":"","price":1500.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Meadow-XXIV-2021-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika.jpg?v=1743604028"},{"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-xxix-2024","title":"Dream Blossom XXIX, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’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=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\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\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\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, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45643628314836,"sku":"","price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Dream-Blossom-XXIX-2024-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1726672332"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxx-2024","title":"Dream Blossom XXX, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’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=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\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\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\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, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45643637915860,"sku":null,"price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/030-Dream-Blossom-XXX-2024-Gareth-McConnell-002.jpg?v=1726672533"},{"product_id":"dream-blossom-xxxi-2024","title":"Dream Blossom XXXI, 2024","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"p1\"\u003e'McConnell’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=\"p1\"\u003eNeal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022\u003c\/p\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\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/span\u003e\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, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45643646042324,"sku":null,"price":150.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/031-Dream-Blossom-XXXI-2024-001.jpg?v=1726672687"},{"product_id":"untitled-xvii-2022-the-horses","title":"untitled XVII, 2022 | The Horses","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e‘These fantastical Horses look like My Little Ponies on Mars'\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSam Anderson, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eAs seen in \u003cem\u003eThe New York Times Magazine, The Observer, The Guardian, Financial Times, ID, AnOther, Creative Review, La Repubblica\u003c\/em\u003e... amongst others\u003cbr\u003e _____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGareth McConnell’s psychedelic Icelandic horse photographs crack open the traditional image of the horse—majestic, controlled, subservient—and rewire it into something more cosmic, more electric. Bathed in hallucinatory hues, his horses seem to flicker between worlds, existing somewhere between dream and hyper-reality, between the ancient and the digital age. Their glowing manes and spectral eyes pulse with a strange sentience, as if they’ve galloped straight out of a vision or a fever dream.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn art history, the horse is a shifting symbol: from the noble war steeds of Renaissance paintings to the color-charged emotional intensity of Franz Marc’s Blue Horse. Marc, a founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter group, believed that color could transcend its visual properties to communicate deeper emotional and spiritual truths. In his color theory, Marc assigned distinct emotional qualities to different colors—blue representing the spiritual and the divine, yellow the playful and the joyful, and red symbolizing the violent and the earthly. This use of color in Marc’s work provides an important parallel to McConnell’s psychedelic horses, where bright, neon hues create a sense of hyperreality, transforming the horses from earthly creatures into symbolic vessels of chaos and freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEdwin Muir’s poem The Horses reimagines them as eerie, almost supernatural survivors of an apocalyptic silence—ancient forces returning to a world that has destroyed itself. McConnell’s horses echo this eerie return, vibrating with the kind of strange, prophetic energy that suggests they know something we don’t.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThen there’s the myth of Nietzsche’s Turin horse, as told by Milan Kundera—a moment of tragic poetry in which the philosopher, upon witnessing a beaten carriage horse, collapses in grief, embracing the animal before descending into madness. It’s a fable of human fragility, of the unbearable weight of witnessing suffering. McConnell himself has said he sees horses as “a symbol of chaos, freedom, and something unknowable and unpredictable at the edge of consciousness.” His images bring that vision to life, transforming these creatures into luminous, almost digital entities. They aren’t just captured; they seem to stare back, dissolving the boundary between human and animal, dream and waking, past and future.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe setting of Iceland adds yet another layer of mysticism and isolation to McConnell’s horses. The raw, volcanic landscape of the island, with its otherworldly terrain and stark beauty, creates an almost spiritual backdrop that seems to charge these creatures with an energy that is both ancient and futuristic. Iceland’s geographic remoteness has long been a place of myth and legend, and in some ways, McConnell’s horses are part of that narrative—a link between the primal forces of nature and the unknown.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis connection to the mystical is further amplified by the influence of Bill Drummond’s theory of interstellar ley lines—those invisible currents of energy that supposedly run through the Earth’s surface, linking sacred sites and cosmic forces. Drummond, in his exploration of these lines, suggests that certain places on Earth, like Iceland, resonate with a unique energy that can influence both physical and spiritual realms. McConnell’s horses seem to exist in that space where ley lines intersect, embodying the energy of the land itself—chaotic, mysterious, and full of potential. His horses are more than just animals; they are symbols of a greater cosmic order, a connection between the earth, the stars, and the human consciousness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_______\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e'When Gareth McConnell was commissioned to photograph the wild horses of Iceland by the \u003cem\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\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/em\u003e set of pictures. The time and place seemed to demand something stranger, more unnatural.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eThe Horses\u003c\/em\u003e – symbols, as the poet wrote, of “that long-lost archaic companionship”.'\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTim Adams,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2023\/jul\/23\/the-big-picture-gareth-mcconnells-icelandic-wild-horses\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e_____\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003eLydia Figes,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.anothermag.com\/art-photography\/15004\/gareth-mcconnell-s-magical-portrait-of-icelandic-horses\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eAnOther\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e_____\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\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\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\u003eNeal Brown\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGareth McConnell, \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.coeval-magazine.com\/coeval\/gareth-mcconnell\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCoeval \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\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\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eEuroNews\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e_____\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003eGareth McConnell,\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.creativereview.co.uk\/photography-annual-2022-gareth-mcconnell\/\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eCreative Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45662272848084,"sku":"","price":1800.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/The-Horses-untitled-XVII-2022-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-006a.jpg?v=1742909242"},{"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":"night-meadow-vii-2018-edition-of-17","title":"Night Meadow VII, 2018","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e_____\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Dream Meadow is the refutation of the doldrums of contemporary life and the belief system that embodies it. It is the collusion of lithe and nimble-bodied tribes perfumed and bent, their rictus bearing the hallmarks and modern traits of ritual abandon – a rejection of the now through perspiration and callous cavorting. Each grimace mustered is a silent exaltation of a performed escape. The Dream Meadow is alive. Its sing song affectation prefers the ear drums of taloned youth – it resounds throughout space like a lost echo of a missed past.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eBrad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eREADMORE\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSimon Pooley\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAlison Green\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e—————-\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\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 data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eNeal Brown\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55093125284214,"sku":null,"price":600.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Meadow-VII-2018-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1734523760"},{"product_id":"night-meadow-xxv-2020","title":"Night Meadow XXV, 2020","description":"\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, The Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e__________\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\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\u003cp\u003eAlistair O’Neil, Aperture\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\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, American Suburb X\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sorika","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55093618213238,"sku":null,"price":250.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0654\/7829\/5764\/files\/Night-Meadow-XXV-2020-Gareth-McConnell-Sorika-001.jpg?v=1734538658"}],"url":"https:\/\/sorika.com\/collections\/limited-edition.oembed","provider":"Sorika","version":"1.0","type":"link"}