Gift of Gift of: Clare Gallagher

Gift of Gift of: Clare Gallagher by Aline SmithsonSeptember 21, 2011

The Gift of Gift of Program recently purchased an image by Northern Ireland photographer, Clare Gallagher, for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston collection.

Clare Gallagher was born in Northern Ireland and studied photography in London, Canterbury, Toulouse and Belfast, earning an MFA photography with distinction. Her work has been exhibited in Belfast, Dublin, Montpellier, London and Houston and will be shown later this year in Bratislava and Delhi. Clare is also a shortlisted artist for Saatchi’s New Sensations 2011. Clare is a photography lecturer living in Northern Ireland and is currently working on a project on weeds, with support from the Arts Council NI.

This image was selected for the Gift of Gift of Program:

Domestic Drift is concerned with everyday life – the ordinary activities, states of mind and conditions of existence that fill time outside the moments of drama and spectacle. I am interested in working with the sense of ordinariness inherent in the repetitive, habitual work of home while trying to appreciate the experience as simultaneously mundane and precious. The everyday is complex terrain. It is always there, readily and universally available; surely it is so obvious that it needs no unveiling. And yet it is also shrouded in haze, our sense of it dulled by familiarity and habit. It may induce a feeling of comfort in simple rituals or of imprisonment in tedious routine.

Ambivalence is a central experience of everydayness but that quality also means it is difficult to define, depict and study. While the ordinary and unremarkable constitute the fabric of much of life, our attention is lured away from the quotidian toward the dramatic and exotic. This privileging of the apparent over the obscure fuels the fragmentation of everyday life and creates an impression that those parts of life lived away from the public arenas of street, workplace and media are unproductive and insignificant. The result of this “triviality barrier” is that the most ordinary, familiar parts of daily life, while seeming the most present and obvious, are often disconnected from our sensory perceptions and conscious thoughts. We are at risk of missing out a significant portion of our experience that is ever-present yet escapes attention.

Inspired by Guy Debord’s Theory of the Dérive, I began by following his directions:
In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.