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    This Hurts

    This Hurts

    Audrey Gillespie is a Fine Artist from Derry Northern Ireland, currently living in Belfast N.I. Gillespie photographs her images in 35mm format.

    Everything I do, I do out of fear. Just as we all do, every day. I fear age and I panic to immortalise my peers and our youth at this hyper conscious point of my life through my camera. I fear isolation, I fear not living the best life, I fear the guilt I’ll feel if I do live the ‘best life’ because some don’t have it that way. I fear I’m driving myself to madness. I fear I’d never really know life at all if I wasn’t mad. I fear it’s all happening to quickly. I fear it can’t happen quick enough. I fear I’ll never be able to make a real decision ever again. Though I know I do, even now.
    Obsession, release, fantasy, my work runs in circles. Building patterns, constructing itself into a wormhole of questions. Questions that ease me and questions that haunt me. Photography acts as a social space and a form of later isolation. Ritualistic and intrinsic to my own comfort I build ‘happy spaces’ for myself with these. Night and darkness feature prominently in both my photography, it’s a space and time cherished by myself from younger memories. Vulnerability and fragility expose themselves throughout the work, in the form of smallness, subtext and saturation.
    I’m trying to understand why I desire to live through other things; masquerading myself as them through my photographs, bleeding my persona into theirs as they do onto mine. I’ve spent so long trying to be one step ahead of the person I thought I was always going to finally become and with that I fear I’ll spend a life time trying to become something else that I’ll never have gotten to know myself. I fear that my art is just an unhealthy obsession put in place in for me to exploit my bad habits. As a young woman the tendency to obsess has been cemented into my being since I even consciously knew how to obsess at all.
    As a queer, depressed and anxious artist, I try and snatch fleeting moments before they’re gone, clinging to whatever brings me a release from time to time. I filter my anxiety into power, power that builds the foundation that makes me make art, which could be called a catharsis. I fixate my anxiety ridden dreams and overwhelming memories creating colour saturated objects and tender moments splayed out for me to remember, to acknowledge and accept.
    I document queer youth through my interactions, stumbling around on this island in Northern Ireland. Driven by a hazy aesthetic I invite the viewer to submerge into a world of my bleared emotions. Using lo-fi techniques to create an unpolished form with 35mm format photography and camcorders, block colours glaze over dark backdrops and I immerse into a personalised constructed fantasy.

    Photographer: Audrey Gillespie | IG: @artdrey__

    Models:

    Ria Adeyinka | IG: @hotgirlbummerr

    Susie Blue IG: @susieblueofficial

    Megan Doherty  IG: @megandoherty.photo

    Gareth Sweeney IG: @shesoblue

    Eloise O’Neil | IG: @eloiserachel0

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    This Hurts

    by The Editors Of The Fox Magazine Time to read this article: 7 min
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