In this month’s Water Café, Paul Carroll joined us for an excellent and moving discussion on his work and how Irish people and communities interact with national waterways.
The primary focus of Carroll’s photography practise is capturing the relationship between people and communities on the island of Ireland and their intersection and interaction with their surroundings, landscape and environment.
Presently he has focused his attention on the inland water routes of the country for his series Redd. It sees Carroll take a unique approach to capture humankind’s often adverse interaction with Ireland’s water bodies. Carroll’s work seeks to bridge genres; it is both a social portrait of Irish communities while fundamentally it reads as landscape.
His work highlights the carelessness with which many people treat water, exposing the scars of consumerism that is reflected in seasonal trends in pollution, and captured poetically in his Redd series.
On an optimistic note, this discussion showed a great deal of promise in terms of new pathways of communicating science and environmental issues to the public. Artists such as Carroll have a unique ability to distill big picture messages, ideas and concepts into succinct and poignant messages. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and Caroll’s work speaks volumes.
This is the final of our Water Cafés for 2021. We will kick off our series of Water Cafés again in January 2021 with some more really interesting perspectives on water.