Draíocht
19 February – 3 May 2025
Rich Gilligan’s ‘The First Draft’ at Draíocht sees the artist curate and revise his extensive body of work, both artistic and commercial, in a gallery setting for the first time. The Amharc Fhine Gall exhibition commission has allowed Gilligan to revisit his archive and his origins in and around Blanchardstown.1 ‘The First Draft’ may not, in the main, be directly derived from the local area, but it presents the work of a photographer whose aesthetic and method were born in the surrounding streets and estates.
Outside of his commercial work, Gilligan is best known for his skateboard-related photography. His book, DIY (19/80 Éditions, 2013), for example, catalogues skater places across the world and finds in them commonalities – despite the obvious territorial and cultural differences in the myriad of places he has visited – whether a style, an attitude, or a shared take on the urban/suburban experience. Skaters are both part of their cities and exist at a slant to it. They use the urban environment in ways that critique the banality of city and suburban living and yet are dependent on and cherishes it. There is something creatively makeshift and independent about skate culture that is crucial to Gilligan’s photographs. His regard for the street, for concrete and tarmac, along with a sense that skating is pushing against constraints, is at the centre of the kind of photographic practice which Gilligan has made for himself.
One of new pieces exhibited here is Linger, a looped digital film work from 2024, which is taken up with the cycle of a carwash, as seen from inside the car. Sitting on one of the elongated sides of a triangular prism structure in the middle of the gallery, Linger becomes a series of fluid abstracts made from the water, suds and drying air of the carwash. The piece shifts between something deeply ordinary to something much more mysterious and elemental yet always manufactured. In its textures and colours, it works as if the ethos and the constituent parts of the photographs on the walls have been condensed into this sequence.
On other side of the prism is another film piece, Untitled (2017), which follows a skateboarder down a street in Williamsburg, New York. The black and white of the film is echoed and accentuated by the monochrome clothing of the Orthodox Jews and other pedestrians whom the skater passes by. The film poses questions about the relationship between the skater and those walking on and off the pavement – whether they are all equally street inhabitants or flâneurs, or whether the skater lives apart form, and in critique of, the pavement walkers.
Taking these two works together, as they look out across the gallery towards the photographs on the walls, gives a strong guide to Gilligan’s work here. He is interested in the shapes, patterns, colours and visual sensations of city life, and he is drawn to the actual and implicit stories of those who live and find a way to play in urban environments.
The walls of the Draíocht gallery include sequences of work from Gilligan’s back catalogue, arranged so as to create an atmosphere, or series of atmospheres, of urban life. The first skateboarding images from Birmingham and Dublin flank a bonfire at Mountview (very much signalling the importance of the locale) from 2004, and between these is a puddle on tarmac in London from 2011, reflecting the sun in a cloudy sky and echoing the light and water imagery of Linger across the way. The other works in the gallery follow this pattern, with light – and therefore a kind of tender hopefulness – being a common motif in the petting of a horse, lit from behind by the sun, kids watching a bonfire, or sunlight on a bush in New York.
Gilligan’s work, consistently through the two decades covered in ‘The First Draft’, takes the energy, independence and creativity of the skateboarder as its foundation, seeing an urban world, full of contained possibility and dignity.
Colin Graham is a writer, farmer, and Professor of English at Maynooth University.
1 Rich Gilligan ‘The First Draft’ is the 13th edition of Amharc Fhine Gall (The Fingal Gaze) – an exhibition programme initiated in 2004 by Fingal County Council Arts Office, in collaboration with Draíocht, to celebrate the work of Fingal artists at all career stages.
