Ashleigh Wilson Antrim, Ireland

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Ashleigh Wilson is an artist & writer based between Belfast & Dublin. As a recent graduate from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, her artwork and research has been presented at venues such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, ART The Hague, Stroom Den Haag and the Black Box, Belfast. She is a core team member of PhotoIreland as well as a freelance contributor to The Pupil Sphere.

Her research based practise explores ‘post’-conflict narratives, micro histories and the politics of visibility. Often her work challenges hegemonic discourses, seeking to create space for new discussions concerning the often intertwined notions of identity and place. The medium of photography also tends to find itself as the subject of her work due to the fact that images act as a site where public space converges with personal identity, where the personal and the political collide.

A key work from Wilson that considers personal histories, politicised identities and questions what should be visible is 'A Sunlit Absence' (2018) which tells the stories of 17 people who were kidnapped by the Irish Republican Army during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The first 16 stories belong to those who are known in Northern Ireland as ‘the disappeared’, the final story is that of the artist’s father.

The work is made only with archival photo paper that expired around the time of the abductions and sunlight from the locations of the disappearances. Alongside each individual blank image is a short story, based on newspaper reports, that details the nature of the disappearance. In this way, Wilson’s practice often draws photography itself into question by playing with the societal and generational distrust of images rife in both ‘post’- conflict Northern Ireland and, more generally, the post-9/11 era.

A kind of unconscious relationship between image resolution and authenticity appears to have been carved out in the aftermath of atrocity. This focus pushes Wilson’s work to the boundaries of the index and, thus, of representation itself.

So, what, then, needs to be seen to act as proof and whose stories matter? Are we truly living in a post-conflict society? These are all central questions that fuel her practise.