gillian eva photography

I’m not really a fan of ‘about pages’. Mainly ’cause I’m not very articulate or coherent talking about myself. But I’m willing to give this a go. Just don’t blame me if it’s an incomprehensible mess.

I’ve always been creative one way or another. I grew up less than 2 minutes walk from a beach and when I wasn’t drawing on or sculpting with sand, I was collecting shells and driftwood and interesting little things that washed up on the Sligo coastline. And in those hazy lazy days of endless summers I’d usually have a camera with me too, collecting little images in my little plastic 110 or 35mm cameras and begging my mother to bring them into town and get the films developed.

Not much has changed in the intervening years. I may have gone to art college and got a fine art degree, taught, life modelled, travelled a bit, taught some more, worked in some crazy-ass jobs, moved back to the west of Ireland and gotten married, but I’ve always carried that need to capture things in my camera and take them home with me and keep them safe. The medium with which I collect those images may have changed, but in essence every time I raise a viewfinder to my eye I’m still just that little girl. Collecting things and taking them home and keeping them safe.

A lot of the things I collect are very personal to me as I go about my daily business. If I’m somewhere urban I tend to collect little pieces of the city that maybe other people overlook. More often than not though, I’m somewhere rural where I try and take home both the absolute beauty and the all consuming loneliness of being in a moment or a place where no one else is.

Hope that wasn’t too messy.