Contact

Gareth McConnell Studio / Sorika Ltd
Studio 15/17 Victor House
282 Richmond Rd
London
E8 3QS

garethwmcconnell@gmail.com

Biography

McConnell was born in Northern Ireland / The North of Ireland, to the joyous pealing of sectarian bells. He became an addict – a fine lineage – and a marching member of the Grand Heroin Lodge of Ireland

McConnell repaid his debt to there-is-no-such-thing-as-society. He did this by the infinite care he took documenting addicts, recognising and honouring them for their outsider holiness – mystics walled up within the improbable acreages of huge social housing estates, with ceremonially punctured, pigmented skin, and practising ritualised loss of blood, and scarification, and death

A process of some kind of logic leads from the still, silent, white light of the Albert Bar series to McConnell’s rapt, nude psychedelia, and incandescent flower power works. It could be said that he depicts a continuity – the character armour of sectarianism, cultism, tribal sub-culture group identity, and their seeking of ideological absolutes. All with aspirations to some kind of great purity

Sky. Clouds. Refracted light. Visionary. Hyper contrast. Hyper frenzied crowds. Or solitude. Or isolation. Scarification. Obstacles and obstructions between the view and the heavenly light

Meaning of flowers:
Hibiscus: rare and delicate beauty
Violet (purple): first love
Foxglove: insecurity
Fern: Magic, enchantment
Poppy; eternal sleep, oblivion, imagination

‘ . . . I was more focused on making political work, whether it be about drug addiction or the situation in Northern Ireland. To take something like flowers and really try and make the subject matter your own is difficult.’ Frieze Week, 2022

Depictions of flowers in McConnell’s works: he commenced with dead or plastic flowers and worked backwards. Kitsch flowers printed on the wallpaper behind the undertaker’s light switch. Flowers depicted in the ticking of a sad and soiled mattress. A vintage tin of butobarbitone (a cheerful barbiturate derivative), in front of which are some flower petals/probably plastic/the light as recorded by McConnell has improbably patient gradations of tone. Dead flowers in poor Mickey Waldorf’s flat. RIP Mickey. Later flower photographs have brazen cyan and magenta. Flowers tend to resolutely not go anywhere, other than wilting in decay, but McConnell’s camera (or reprographic process) makes everything dance forever. Flash. Separation and disjunction. The retina bounces in the human skull, detaches itself, goes for a staggering walk on its little legs, grooving to early acid house, or whatever it is that McConnell is playing – ‘some kind of Andrew Weatherall-ish, post-punk, ravey, country and western, acid house, disco.’ Raw shadow. Slippage. De-registration. Obliteration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic colour. Vertical planes of colour. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me colours of sex. A bomb explosion of gloss paint planted in a crowd of innocent shoppers, many people not dead. Paramilitary identifiers. Haemorrhage colours. Hedonist colour. Psychedelic colours – the colours of the goddess, Psyche, well known to be somewhat mentally ill, who ended up in rehab, shagged a hideous and vile man, also a newcomer, got thrown out, but got clean in the end. Natural form, contours, leafage. McConnell’s night flowers – urban flowers are an epitome of the nocturnal city (The City of Dreadful Night), and its shrill LED, neon, or sodium street lighting, night moths, and dead poets

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He is founder and editor-in-chief of Sorika (est. 2013) an ongoing collaborative art project. His work has been featured and written about in internationally recognised art and news publications such as Aperture, Frieze, The Guardian / Observer and The New York Times and has been included in major survey art shows. He has collaborated with diverse brands such Chloe, Jo Malone and Sports Banger. He has organised events and spoken about his work at numerous academic and cultural institutions including Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and The National Portrait Gallery, London. His work is in collections both public and private including the British Council, Elton John and UBS.

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