Moira McIver, whose residency at Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow was originally planned for 2020 was finally able to visit in September 2021. In her recent work she has used digital manipulation of family photography and official documents to explore three generations of migration between Donegal and Glasgow, from the 1930s-1980s. She draws attention to elliptical shapes as repeated patterns in the family photographs and official documents; the frame of the photograph, the official passport stamp allowing entry into another country, the lens of the eye in a medical chart. The ellipse is reminiscent of the artist’s family’s seasonal migration between countries, and revolving orbits of
closeness and distance.
The residency at Street Level enabled her to further explore narratives around migration, travel and social connections between Glasgow and Donegal. In the 1930s, Jerome Photography Studios in Glasgow were very popular with Irish migrants. Many would have their studio photograph taken to send back, as postcards, to family in Donegal. She is interested in this popular history and also how projections of self have changed within the digital age. She is also interested in the private bus companies which have transported thousands of people back and forward between Donegal and Glasgow since the 1970s, through periods of border control, the Troubles and now into the era of Brexit.
Malcolm Dickson and the team in Street Level were welcoming and supportive, linking her with local people and putting her in touch with other artists/photographers. She interviewed a number of people who were relevant to the project and took part in an Open Museum
Community online event where she connected with people who generously shared stories of their family’s experience and showed her their family photographs. She also met with Frank McElhinney the artist who had completed a residency at Artlink in 2019 as part of the Artlink/Street Level Photoworks exchange and interviewed his father Frank, who had spent his summers in Donegal as a young man.
Moira’s photography and video works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including USA, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands and included in group exhibitions such as; Northern Ireland; 30 Years of Photography, MAC Gallery, Belfast (2013). She worked on a number of site-specific public artworks for the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, Belfast, Maternity Unit (2007) and the Victorian Walled Garden, Bangor (2009).
- September 30, 2021
