Stephanie Joy

From Clonmel County Tipperary originally, Stephanie Joy’s lifelong interest with the arts and indeed photography started from a young age, and was heightened by her experiences of living and working in Paris, in the eighties. Her travels to South America in the nineties, affected her decision to work as an artist - in particular the journey through Patagonia and the Beagle Channel - here she realized a long held dream to discover this wild silent landscape and she renewed her explorations with visual imagery through photography.

This exhibition of photographs was conceived on the wild, barren landscape of the Burry estuary in Wales and is composed of both landscape and portrait images. Stephanie elaborates “I had no idea why I wanted to work there. However, as I explored this instinct visually, the work emerged. A web of associations formed, fleeting and hazy, between this landscape and holidays spent in Waterford. I was connecting with a past time beyond conscious memory.”

While this body of work is highly personal, at the same time it reminds us that it is with people, and locations, and through story that we make sense of our world.

Studying under Paul Seawright, she completed a degree in Documentary Photography in the University of Wales, Newport in 2003. An earlier project ‘Waiting’ 2003, involving immigrants in rural Ireland, received a merit, in the Metro Eireann/RTE, Media and Multicultural Awards (MAMA 2004), in the individual Multicultural Section.

Read an interview with Stephanie Joy here