Darragh Casey’s current series ‘Shelf Portraits’, created and photographed in Cork, Ireland, ‘shelves’ 3 generations of the Casey family. It focuses on the traditional role of the shelf as a device to display, portraying people significant to the artist alongside objects relevant to their own lives and personalities.
“Shelving the Body” aims to disrupt our habitual relationships with furniture and reassess the idea of the ‘user’. This subversion, initiated through a series of experimentation and trials, approaches the typology of the shelf with a physical consideration for the figure. At times, the outcomes often reduce the role of the figure to that of a ‘shelved object’, exploring the idea of mutual dependency, challenging its user, or simply taking inspiration from the figure’s presence.
