Clare Gallagher

Clare Gallagher was born in Northern Ireland and studied photography in London, Canterbury and Belfast, earning an MFA Photography with distinction. A photography lecturer since 2003, she is also working on a practice-based PhD.

Her work examines the ordinary and everyday, focusing on experiences of home. It has been exhibited in Europe, North America and Asia and been featured in The Guardian, Lenscratch and Source Photographic Review. She was selected for Saatchi's New Sensations, Platform at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, Magenta's Flash Forward Emerging Photographers and SCAN Tarragona's Talent Latent.

View more of Clare's work here

Verges Statement

The photographs in Verges are an attempt to examine the Situationist potential of the everyday through the growth and habits of weeds. I think our ordinary surroundings might suggest and inspire resistance to the capitalist desire for commodity and spectacle.

It is easy to feel so tightly constrained by grown-up concerns that we don’t have time to notice what we encounter everyday. It becomes hard to see the opportunities for pleasure or plenitude lurking within them. Rocks and trees stop being forts, scraps of paper become just mess, and dandelions, goose grass and buttercups evolve from playthings into hostile invaders of our land.

These photographs are an attempt to reclaim some of the freedom and creativity that weeds exhibit, growing wherever suits them, however untidy or inconvenient it is for us. Making use of tiny scraps of dirt to grow roots, they use ingenious ways to find spaces in hostile environments to thrive, teasing our desire for order and control. I think that observing and recording them offers a playful, life-affirming perspective that resists judgmental thinking about our everyday environment and invites us to experience it anew.