Jill Quigley // INTER//VENTION

About

Seen Fifteen Gallery is delighted to return to Safehouse 1, Peckham, to present a solo show and site-specific installation by Irish artist, Jill Quigley.  

Part photography, part performance and part street art, The Cottages of Quigley’s Point began as a series of “interventions” in abandoned nineteenth century cottages in rural County Donegal.  Known locally as “famine cottages”, many of these old dwellings have been left within the solitude of the landscape to quietly decay.  Some have been left for long enough that nature is in the process of reclaiming them, with trees and weeds growing inside.  While others have the eerie air of more recent desertion - in one, a net curtain is still pulled across the window, cupboard doors are left ajar and a print of Madonna and Child hangs on the kitchen wall.  

Nostalgia for the ruins of a bygone era, however, is far from Jill Quigley’s mind.  With her interventions she embraces and celebrates these places as she finds them in the present.  Alone, she borrows the cottages briefly and stages a private performance - asserting her modern-day presence with neon spray paints, by barricading passages with string installations, or with tongue-in-cheek graffiti recreations of the pictures she finds left hanging on the walls.  Once her energetic intervention is over, she leaves and returns the cottage back to the landscape.  The result is a confident collision of past and present, and a series of playful photographs that challenge the recent trend in “ruin-porn”.  

“The addition of bright colours and movement in these empty interiors situates the subject in the present as encountered.  As such, the process of intervention subverts a wistful reading of a disappearing way of life.”

Jill Quigley

In keeping with the subject, the exhibition will take place within the borrowed interior of a derelict terraced house in Peckham.  In the stripped-out rooms of Safehouse 1 on Copeland Road, the full series of Cottages of Quigley’s Point will be on display.  And for the first time Jill Quigley will stage a public “intervention” in the space that guests will be invited to wander amongst.  

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jill Quigley (b. 1981) is an Irish photographer, based in Belfast.  She is a graduate of the MFA Photography programme at University of Ulster, tutored by Paul Seawright.  In 2014, she was nominated as “One to Watch” by the British Journal of Photography (Vol.161, January 2014), and she has been recently selected to take part in the Belfast Exposed Futures programme.  

Recent and upcoming exhibitions include:

Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam (2015)

Rural Flourescent, Belfast Exposed Gallery (2015)

Fresh Faced & Wild Eyed, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2015)

House and Home, commissioned by Belfast Photo Festival for the Ulster Museum, Belfast (2015)

Evidence, Format Festival, Derby (2015)