£150.00
This bundle includes - 1 x signed copy of To The Beat Of The Drum, 1 x Dream Blossom XIV, 2022 | Edition of 50 | C-type super gloss print | 10 x 8 inch | Signed, titled & numbered, 1 x copy of The Meaning of Flowers by Neal Brown
____
Sorika is pleased to announce the publication of Gareth McConnell’s new book, To the Beat of the Drum. The book comprises photographs of youthful members of Northern Ireland’s militaristic, Protestant marching bands, who McConnell carefully situates under the trippy magic of his super-chromatic, hedonistic lighting. These photographs and their mood-altering colours are compelling visual studies of youth and social identity – McConnell gives strong emphasis to how identity is subject to the variable relationships of the individual and the group. The book is accompanied by an essay by Sean O’Hagan (first published in The Observer’s New Review, 2021).
Much of the youth identity seen in McConnell’s previous work relates to outsider or misfit groups, which McConnell has documented with high sensibility. These include rave and dance culture, using and recovering addicts, and the nature of the allegiances formed through musical identity. In an unexpected reframing of his interests, McConnell’s attention in To the Beat of the Drum gives attention to young people’s participation in the militaristic, culturally complex, power assertions of Northern Ireland’s working class culture, in this case a Protestant one. During Northern Ireland’s ‘marching season’ thousands of Protestant parades take place, whose controversial war drums and flutes announce Protestant loyalism’s celebration of the military victory of King William of Orange over Catholic King James II in 1690. Catholics have their own strong versions of power assertion, and both Protestants and Catholics may each be seen as simultaneously an insider and an outsider group, within the context of historical group relativities on the island of Ireland.
McConnell is from Northern Ireland, and his religion influenced background, in combination with his own outsider life experiences, qualify his contemplation of what insider and outsider status might mean. It seems that McConnell is observing the great paradox of the human experience as both individual and social. This has been addressed by many; Kierkegaard, William James, and syncretism, and includes some areas that might be called those of disorganised (as opposed to organised) religion. In this way McConnell honours ideas and thoughts about the nature of crowds and the individual, and offers hints of something more universal. This universal something seems to be beyond just a local imagination, and might even be blissful and transcendent.
Neal Brown, 2022
_____
'This summer’s marching season may be particularly tense, even volatile, owing to unionist anger at the “border in the Irish sea” created by the imposition of the post-Brexit Northern Irish customs protocol. In early April, just a week after McConnell shot these portraits, the worst rioting in years erupted in Carrickfergus and Larne as well as in other working-class loyalist areas in Belfast and Derry. The protagonists were mainly young teenagers, though many commentators suggested that the violence had been orchestrated by older members of loyalist paramilitary groups. The BBC noted that the areas affected were “among the most deprived in the country, with the lowest level of educational attainment in Europe”.
Against all this, Gareth McConnell’s portraits of young working-class Protestant band members are all the more resonant. The young band members often exude a sense of awkward vulnerability. Bathed in soft light and colour, his subjects stare inquiringly into the lens or off into the distance as if distracted by wandering thoughts. Their engagement with the camera is tentative, uncertain, as if they’re not quite sure why they have been singled out for its attention. What is also striking is just how young some of them are. You cannot help but wonder how much the band experience is another way of inculcating in them the divisive, often sectarian attitudes that are handed down through the generations.'
Sean O'Hagan | The Observer, 2021
_____
Flowers 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
Neal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers