My name is Roisin Conlon, a visual artist based in Limerick City. My most recent work to date 'Big Dark Room' is an installation that I feel encapsulates the motivations behind my artistic identity, bringing together a contortion of seemingly opposing artistic mediums which fuse in harmony together as one - a possible metaphor for my artistic process thus far. Big Dark Room centres on just one of the many emotionally charged spaces of my childhood home – the attic. This room acts a repository of the possessions, memories, and thoughts too difficult to confront and yet too onerous to let go of.Brought to fruition through a lyrical and photographical balance of subjective and objective perceptions, I engage with philosophical thought on the symbolism of the house as both a protective and feared space, the influence of architecture on our experience and mentality and the disquieting slippage between what seems homely and what is unequivocally unhomely through an uncanny lens.French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space“If one would ask us what is the most precious benefaction of the house, we would say: the house accommodates dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows us to dream in peace.”What then occurs when the protective qualities and peace within the house are relinquished. The fear and loss of control over our perceived safe space can be hard to decipher when considering how perception can be both subjective and objective. I present a body of work coded through architectural and material properties simultaneously imbued with a personal narrative of longing and grief.The personal motivations behind my work are revealed in the pages of my accompaniment publication dedicated to my mother. My attic functions like a shrine for her and her alcoholism, and the more time spent up there the more I found myself talking to rafters as if I was back in my childhood body reimagining the life that existed when all the contents of the boxes existed amongst the rest in the body of our home.
