Gareth McConnell

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

garethwmcconnell@gmail.com

Gareth McConnell (b. 1972, Northern Ireland / The North of Ireland) is an artist and photographer, and founder and editor-in-chief of Sorika, an ongoing collaborative art and publishing project established in 2013.

His work has been featured in internationally recognised art, culture, and news publications including Aperture, Colours, Creative Review, Dazed, Frieze, Granta, la Repubblica, The Guardian, The Observer, Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

His work has been included in major survey exhibitions such as Observers: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930s to Now and The Portrait of Northern Ireland: Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto. His work is the subject of several monographs including Contemporary Photographers (Steidl), Close Your Eyes (SPBH Editions), and The Horses (Sorika), and has appeared in numerous anthologies including Another Man: Men’s Style Stories, The New York Times Magazine Photographs, and Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography.

He has collaborated with brands including Adidas, BBC, Chloé, Jo Malone, Kiko Kostadinov, Nike, and Sports Banger, and has organised events and spoken at institutions including Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

His work is held in public and private collections including the British Council, the Elton John Art Collection, Imperial Health Charity, the Royal College of Art, Selfridges, and UBS.

Recent solo exhibitions include To The Beat Of The Drum, Ulster Museum, Belfast, 2021, and The Brighter the Flowers, The Fiercer the Town, Seen Fifteen, London, 2022. Recent group exhibitions include Photos on Fridges, Harkawik, New York, 2026 and Kindred: The Loneliness of Suffering and the Community of Lived Experience, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, London, 2026.

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Sorika is an on-going art and publishing project established by Gareth McConnell in 2013. It was initiated as a way to collaborate with other artists, with no manifesto beyond the realising of projects of shared interest, and with no commitment to any specific medium or genre. More recently, it has also functioned as a platform for the direct sale of artworks and editions online.

Since its inaugural publication, the novella Horse Latitudes by Chris Wilson in 2013. Sorika’s projects have included Looking for Love for Love, a reworking of Looking for Love, Tom Wood’s seminal 1980s photo-book; A New Concise Reference Dictionary and Glossary of Usage Terms and Subjects in Contemporary Art by the artist and writer Neal Brown; and the co-curation and publication of Smiler: Photographs of London by Mark Cawson, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Sorika has also published a number of McConnell’s own works including the publications Sex, Drugs & Magick (Book II), The Horses and To The Beat Of The Drum.

Works published by Sorika are held in public collections including the British Library, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Walker Art Gallery and the Royal College of Art.
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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.

Neal Brown, Stinky Words

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The Krossing, (Prophetic Promotions Press in association with Sports Banger, Sorika, K2 Plant Hire Ltd and L-13 Light Industrial Workshop), 2025
Details Of Sectarian Murals (Sorika), 2024
Paramilitaries (Sorika), 2023
The Horses (Sorika), 2023
The People Deserve Beauty (Sorika | Sports Banger), 2023
To The Beat Of The Drum (Sorika), 2022
The Dream Meadow (Sorika), 2020
Sex, Drugs & Magick (Sorika), 2015
Close Your Eyes (SPBH Editions), 2014
Gareth McConnell: Contemporary Photographers (Steidl), 2004
Back2Back (All Change), 2004
Wherever You Go (Lighthouse), 2002

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As publisher / editor / collaborator

Smiler, Mark Cawson & Neal Brown (Sorika), 2015
Looking For Looking For Love, Tom Wood, (Sorika), 2014
A New Concise Reference Dictionary and Glossary of Usage Terms And Subjects In Contemporary Art, Neal Brown, (Sorika), 2014
Horse Latitudes, Chris Wilson (Sorika), 2013

 

Window, Ellen Mara De Wachter, 2025
Details of Sectarian Murals: Abstraction as Survival Strategy and Utopic Appeal, Sarah Allen, 2023
The People Deserve Beauty, Matt Williams, 2023
The Horses, Neal Brown, 2022
To The Beat Of The Drum, Sean O’Hagan, 2022
The Meaning Of Flowers, Neal Brown, 2022
Get Born, Go to school, Go to work, And die, Niall Griffiths, 2014
Where Strangers Take You By The Hand, Matthew Collins, 2014
Sex, Drugs & Magick, Sean O’Hagan, 2014
Acetate 2, Chris Wilson, 2011
Community Service, Tom Morton, 2005
Gareth McConnell, David Chandler, 2004
Gareth McConnell, Alison Green, 2004
It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding, Simon Pooley, 2004
On And Off Drugs, Neal Brown, 2004
Art As Irritant, Suzanne O’Shea, 2001
Carrickfergus, Susan McKay, 2001

Tank, 2025
Dazed, 2025
American Suburb X, 2025
Observer New Review, 2024
Dazed, 2024
Observer New Review, 2023
Build Hollywood, 2023
The New York Times, 2022
The Guardian, 2022
British Journal Of Photography, 2022
Frieze, 2021
Aperture, 2020