THOSE FAMILIAR with the
photography of Pádraig Grant were treated to a new departure for
the visual artist on Saturday night; as he opened his first ever exhibition
of colour photography at the Sony Centre on Main St. It was also a first
in other ways as Pádraig embraced cutting-edge Sony technology
to display his work on immense Bravia LCD screens.
A suspicion that the technology would distract from the images on display
was to prove unjustified for the majority of his large following; even
if a Scottish man grabbed one of the Sony team present to inquire as to
the best type of speakers “to go with this deadly system I have
at home.” For the majority, however, the vibrancy of the colours
in the images captured by Pádraig in his trip to post-tsunami Sri
Lanka were a startling reminder of the ferocious gifts the photographer
has at his command.
One image in particular captured the attention and admiration of everyone
present on Saturday night. An image of the Mona Lisa covered in debris
that shards of mirror had transformed into something more akin to the
Madonna with child. “That image for me captured much of what my
trip to Sri Lanka was about,” said Pádraig. “In a bizarre
way the Mona Lisa has been transformed to look like the Madonna.
“When I first saw it, I wondered what the Mona Lisa was even doing
in the home of a Sri Lankan family – but if you look closely, you
can see that they had overlaid it with mirrored glass and were using it
as a mirror. When the tsunami came along, it flattened their house to
the ground and shattered the mirror allowing the painting to emerge from
the ashes. Just as the tsunami allowed the spirit of the people of Sri
Lanka to soar above the hardship and desperate poverty the tsunami inflicted
upon them as a people.”
Echo Group Editor, Tom Mooney, who launched Pádraig’s exhibition,
said staff of the newspaper have long referred to Pádraig as the
Indiana Jones of modern photography. “My first night in Wexford
20 years ago coincided with one of Pádraig’s earliest exhibitions,”
he said, "and even at that stage, Pádraig was taking pictures
that put another side of the world on show. Throughout the 80s, Pádraig
was constantly going missing and the next time I would see him would be
when he had returned from some far flung trouble spot around the world.
Of course, what Pádraig was doing was helping Irish charities by
displaying the depths of the misery and suffering endured by people in
the aftermath of war and natural disasters.”
However, Mr. Mooney continued that more important to Pádraig was
capturing the hope and ability of people displaced by fighting and famine
to overcome adversity. “This is a theme that has run through so
much of his work,” he said, “capturing the hope that helps
people caught up in such situations to succeed.”
The images displayed in Pádraig’s current exhibition are
priced at €195 with each image sold limited to 10 in number. |
