Meaning accumulates in the spaces between pictures
In the subterranean rooms of Dublin's International Centre for the Image, ten Irish artists have gathered not to celebrate photography's power to freeze meaning, but to honestly reckon with its limits. New Irish Works 2026, now in its fifth triennial iteration, quietly dismantles Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment as its organising myth, proposing instead that photographs are fragments — partial, incomplete, only meaningful in combination with other images, voices, and materials. From a grandmother's escape from a mother-and-baby home to the contested sovereignty of a remote Atlantic rock, these works ask what is left out of every frame, and who decides what a space or a life is allowed to mean.
- Photography's long-held promise of capturing truth in a single instant is under direct challenge — these ten artists treat the medium as fundamentally incomplete, a gesture that requires accumulation rather than revelation.
- The works carry real weight: institutional trauma, contested land, housing politics, protest, and the male gaze embedded in art history all press against the edges of the frame, refusing tidy resolution.
- Artists layer photographs with audio, text, colour-coded stickers, physical alteration, and archival overflow — complicating the image rather than clarifying it, insisting that meaning lives in the gaps between pictures.
- The exhibition design holds the complexity with care, yet a quiet tension surfaces: projects this intellectually layered risk being absorbed into a collective argument before the viewer has time to inhabit each one fully.
- The show lands as a serious and coherent meditation, but raises an open question about format — whether work that refuses simplicity is best encountered in the company of nine others, or given room to breathe alone.
The International Centre for the Image sits below street level in Dublin, its moody, introspective rooms asking visitors to slow down. It is a fitting home for New Irish Works 2026, the fifth iteration of a triennial grown from Photo Ireland's 2013 festival, in which ten artists selected through open competition have built an extended meditation on what photography cannot quite say on its own.
The exhibition's quiet intellectual spine is a rejection of Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment — the idea that meaning crystallises in a single instant. Here, photography is treated as partial, incomplete, gaining weight only through combination with other images, voices, and materials. Meaning accumulates in the spaces between pictures.
Miriam O'Connor pairs night-vision wildlife footage with text that reveals the work as a negotiation between art and family life. Debbie Castro applies colour-coded stickers to old photographs; Kate Nolan and her collaborator explore how memory and image intertwine. Austin Hearne spreads his archive across folding tables in deliberate disorder, mirroring both personal paralysis and the endless flood of images we all generate online. Garry Loughlin turns to Rockall, a contested island, while Mandy O'Neill documents Dublin 7's housing politics through photographs paired with audio, diary entries, and transcribed conversations.
Billy Kenrick's film photographs of Inis Mór — inspired by Antonin Artaud's 1937 journey — sit as the show's most conventionally photographic work. Dorje de Burgh documents protest and state response in the manner of Wolfgang Tillmans, scattering images of varying sizes across walls, emphasising absence as much as presence. Emily O'Connell stages photographs narrating her grandmother's escape from a mother-and-baby home in 1964, placing personal history inside the wound of institutional trauma. Ciara Richardson physically alters images of classical sculptures, interrogating the male gaze embedded in art history itself.
The exhibition is thoughtful and its design exemplary, yet a tension is worth naming. The layered complexity these artists have built — their refusal of singular meaning — might breathe more freely in solo presentation. A group show, even one this carefully curated, can move the viewer too quickly between distinct intellectual worlds, and individual vision risks being absorbed into the larger conversation. That is not a failure. It is an honest question about how we present work that refuses to be simple.
The International Centre for the Image sits below street level in Dublin, its subterranean rooms lit in a way that feels deliberate—moody, introspective, the kind of space that asks you to slow down. It's a fitting home for New Irish Works 2026, a triennial exhibition that has grown out of Photo Ireland's 2013 festival and now stands in its fifth iteration. Ten artists, selected through open competition, have brought their work here, and what emerges is not a show about capturing the perfect moment, but rather an extended meditation on what photography cannot quite say on its own.
The exhibition's intellectual spine is a quiet rejection of Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous idea of the decisive moment—that singular instant when everything aligns and meaning crystallizes. Instead, these artists treat photography as something fundamentally incomplete, a partial gesture that only gains weight when combined with other images, other voices, other materials. Meaning accumulates. It emerges in the spaces between pictures.
Miriam O'Connor's Fox=Cow uses wildlife camera footage shot at night, images often pushed to the edges of their frames, paired with text that reveals the work as a negotiation between art, family, and the demands of living. Debbie Castro and Kate Nolan (working with Peter) both mine family archives—Castro applying color-coded stickers to old photographs, Nolan and her collaborator exploring how memory and image intertwine, how the past seeps into the present. These are not nostalgic gestures. They're attempts to understand what a photograph actually holds, and what it leaves out.
Austin Hearne arranges his own archive across folding tables with no apparent order, creating a kind of visual overflow that mirrors both his own paralysis around selection and the endless stream of images we all generate and share online. Garry Loughlin examines Rockall island—a place whose sovereignty is contested—while Mandy O'Neill documents housing and planning in Dublin 7 through photographs paired with audio, diary entries, and transcribed conversations. These are projects rooted in place and politics, in the question of who gets to decide what a space means.
Billy Kenrick's work, inspired by Antonin Artaud's 1937 journey to Inis Mór, stands as perhaps the most conventionally photographic in the show—island details captured on film, mostly black and white, a few washed-out Polaroids. Dorje de Burgh's Now Is the Time takes the most overtly political stance, documenting protest and state response in the manner of Wolfgang Tillmans, with obscured faces and images scattered across walls in varying sizes and formats, emphasizing absence as much as presence. Emily O'Connell stages photographs that narrate her grandmother's escape from a mother-and-baby home in 1964, a work that sits at the intersection of personal history and institutional trauma. Ciara Richardson physically alters photographs of classical sculptures, interrogating both visibility and the male gaze embedded in art history itself.
The work throughout is thoughtful, and the exhibition design is exemplary. Yet there's a tension worth naming: the complexity these artists have built—the layering, the refusal of singular meaning—might breathe more freely in solo presentation. A group show, even one this carefully curated, can feel like it asks the viewer to move too quickly between distinct intellectual projects. The strength of individual vision sometimes gets absorbed into the larger conversation about what photography can and cannot do. That's not a failure of the exhibition. It's a question about how we present work that refuses to be simple.
Notable Quotes
Faith in the decisive moment has been sidelined by more complex considerations of photography as an ever-partial endeavour— Exhibition concept
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does the critic keep returning to the idea of photography as incomplete or partial? What's the point of showing work that doesn't try to say something whole?
Because that's closer to how we actually experience images now. We don't see one photograph and understand everything. We scroll through dozens, we see the same moment from different angles, we read captions, we learn context later. These artists are being honest about that fragmentation instead of pretending a single image can contain meaning.
But doesn't that make the work harder to engage with? Shouldn't art try to communicate clearly?
It communicates, but not in the way Cartier-Bresson promised. It communicates through accumulation, through what's left out, through the gaps. When Emily O'Connell stages photographs about her grandmother's escape from an institution, she's not trying to give you a clean narrative. She's trying to show you what it feels like to recover something that was hidden.
The critic mentions the subterranean space seems to suit the work. Why would that matter?
Because these aren't grand statements. They're intimate investigations. A basement gallery—something below the street, removed from the everyday—creates the right psychological space for that kind of looking. It says: slow down, pay attention to what's partial and fragmented.
And the final critique about solo versus group presentation—is that saying the show failed?
No. It's saying the show succeeded in what it set out to do, but it also revealed something about how this kind of complex work wants to be experienced. When you're moving between ten different artists, each with their own layered approach, you're always a little bit in motion. Solo shows would let each artist's logic unfold more fully. It's not a flaw in the curation. It's a question about format.