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Dr Cian Quayle

Dr Cian Quayle is a practicing artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. Cian’s practice finds its basis in artist journeys and through the encounters and relationships with place and people which follow. This includes the use of family snapshots, found photographs and other forms of vernacular photography.

Quayle’s research investigates ideas of place, concepts of home, and the trajectories, spaces and encounters, which index or trace the movement between one place and another. The way that artist journeys and travel activate these connections provides the basis for strategies and practices, which adopt autobiographical and layered narratives related to wider identities and exile cultures.

An eclectic array of step off points includes responses to the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Belgian cycling legend Eddy Merckx, Fletcher Christian and the Bounty Mutineers as well as other artists and writers legacies. Cian’s formative research examined the work of artists in America using photography as a Photoconceptual and performative document including Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler and Bas jan Ader, and the work of artists in Europe collecting and transforming found objects and materials including Jimmie Durham, Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters.

Recent projects and writing have followed in the footsteps of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ internment and exile, and Wirral born author Malcolm Lowry’s relationship with the sea: the Isle of Man, Vancouver and Liverpool, which he described as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean.’ Clochán is a recent project which explores the landscape of Ireland and its sites of pilgrimage and shelter, boundaries and borders. Sites of the Habitus and the Filmic investigates dwelling, retail, work, and leisure, in relation to the cinematic space of the city and the contested space of the contemporary landscape.

Dr Cian Quayle

Associate Professor; Programme Leader: BA (Hons) Photography

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Dr Cian Quayle

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