A photographic artist and researcher exploring how photographic processes are materially entangled with the environments they attempt to represent and climate change, water, extraction and plants.
I am an Irish-German photographic artist, educator and practice-led PhD researcher at Technological University Dublin, based in London.
My work explores how photographic processes are materially entangled with the environments they attempt to represent, with a particular focus on climate change, water, extraction, plants and the ecological responsibilities of analogue photography.
Much of my practice is cameraless and develops from nineteenth-century photographic processes, particularly cyanotype. Rather than treating these techniques as fixed historical recipes, I adapt them to the environmental conditions of particular places. In what I describe as climate-adapted photography, local sunlight, rainwater, seawater, plants, soils, minerals, temperature and weather become active participants in making the image.
My fieldwork has taken place across coastal and environmentally vulnerable landscapes, including the Outer Hebrides, Shetland, Ireland, northern Europe and, most recently, Svalbard in the High Arctic.
A central strand of my current PhD research is The Ecological Wetroom™, an experimental photographic installation and working research system that asks a deceptively simple question: what happens to photography's materials after the image has been made? Instead of allowing cyanotype washwater to disappear immediately down a drain, I collect it, observe it, pass it through experimental low-tech filtration media and retain the resulting residues. The project brings photography into conversation with plants, water systems, material science and laboratory analysis while deliberately avoiding claims that there is a simple or completely "sustainable" photographic solution. This has led me increasingly towards questions of extraction. Photography depends upon water, paper, metals, minerals, manufactured chemistry, energy and global material infrastructures. I am interested in the contradiction of using these extracted resources to make images that themselves attempt to witness ecological damage and climate change. Rather than positioning the photographer outside environmental crisis, my work asks how we might acknowledge our own material implication within it.
Alongside making photographs and installations, I work through socially engaged workshops, artist talks and collaborative research, using historical processes as accessible ways of opening conversations around climate, material responsibility and environmental change. I am especially interested in working across disciplines and building relationships with scientists, curators, researchers, educators and other artists. For me, photography is therefore not simply a means of depicting a changing world. It is a material process occurring within that world, dependent upon it, entangled with it and responsible to it.
Creative Showcase
Aindreas has contributed a piece to our Creative Showcase, an evolving collection of new and recent works from our members.
In And So I Watch You From Afar, he discusses his photographic installation, where cyanotype is both image and material event. And So I Watch You From Afar is part of ongoing research into photography’s material footprint, reconsidering it not only as technique, but as a process that registers the environmental conditions in which an image is made.