£50.00
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Made in my studio and presented on the occasion of Off-Print, Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris, 2024.
Created using materials to hand, A4 paper, laser printer, staples, chinagraph pencil, stapler etc.
Accompanying c-type print made by myself in the darkroom, each one slightly different, signed on the back.
The beds are from a series called 'Meditations' made 2002 - 2005, the flowers are from ongoing series, 'Dream Blossom' and 'Dream Meadow', 2019 - present.
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Some words on the projects
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‘If the absence of people from McConnell’s meeting rooms suggests perhaps their users’ apotheosis, a different sort of absence is in play in his series Meditations (2002-05). Here, the artist shoots his empty bed, their crumpled sheets resembling icebergs, mountains and stormy waters in what might be described as an exercise in the domestic sublime. Looking at these works, we get to thinking about bad dreams and hastily abandoned sex, of ailing bodies being rushed from bed to ambulance. It’s possible that such despair-inducing imaginings are the ‘Meditations’ of which McConnell’s title speaks, but there’s something about the shots’ calm blue light that makes me think that’s not so. Rather, the artist asks the viewer to let their thoughts wash over them in the manner of a sea, or a landscape, and accept that however negative they are, they will pass, as all things do. Beds, like bodies, or lives, are constantly made, unmade then made again. They are places of birth and death, passion and rest, sickness and recovery. As an emblem of McConnell’s work, the abandoned bed is perfect. His photographs are concerned with life, yes, but also a sort of after-life, the place where unrecoverable moments go once they’ve been separated from us by a shutter’s click, a sound as decisive as the ticking of a clock.’
Tom Morton
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‘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.
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 (2002-05), 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 & 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.'
Alison Green
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'With 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
(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).'
Neal Brown