Photo Museum Ireland in association with The Source Arts Centre is delighted to present Enda Bowe’s award-winning photographic series Love’s Fire Song.
Over five years, Bowe worked with young people on either side of the peace walls in Northern Ireland. Taking the symbolic bonfires of the Twelfth as his starting point, Bowe worked collaboratively with people from both sides of the sectarian divide to create a series of open-ended visual narratives. The young people portrayed are often defined in opposition to each other by their cultural background and inherited sense of place.
Love’s Fire Song moves beyond binary or reductive classifications to look at participation in bonfire culture as a continuum of the ancient ritual of gathering around a bonfire.
Love’s Fire Song is concerned with storytelling and the search for light and beauty in the ordinary. Inspired by the ethos of the late John Hume, Bowe’s deeply empathetic portraits go beyond stereotypical representations to touch on shared human experiences of longing, vulnerability, joy and celebration
“To everyone’s life no matter how ordinary, a life just as beautiful and dramatic as everybody else’s. All the joy, stillness, subtleties of emotion and sadness in the everyday which links us all is what l am honing in on. People like to be acknowledged, they want to have an identity and presence in a world where they may feel they are not seen nor heard. The emotional narrative of everyone’s life is interesting, and that is what l am drawn to.”
Enda Bowe
Where others might see mundane, everyday situations, Bowe finds beauty, hope and optimism. Love’s Fire Song looks beyond the often destructive influence of history to reflect on the commonalities that exist between seemingly disparate places and lives.
Supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Reconciliation Funds.
Artist’s Biography:
Enda Bowe’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including: Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Red Hook Gallery, New York; Gallery of Photography Ireland; the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the National Portrait Gallery, London; Fotohof, Salzburg; The Visual Centre Of Contemporary Art, Ireland and most recently in The Other Side, Dortmunder U, Dortmund, Germany.
His collection of work At Mirrored River received the international Solas Photography Award 2015. He was nominated for the Prix Pictet Award 2016 and the Deutsche Borse Foundation Photography Prize 2016. In the UK his work has been shortlisted for the National Gallery Portrait Prize for 2019 for Love’s Fire Song and was runner-up for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2019. Bowe’s first monograph Kilburn Cherry was published by J&J Books and received the Birgit Skiold Artist Award 2014 from the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
In self-publishing his photobook At Mirrored River the artist was kindly supported by the Victoria & Albert Museum, Oscar nominated director Ken Loach and writer Colm Toibín. This book coincided with the exhibition of At Mirrored River at The Visual Centre of Contemporary Art, Ireland. His third monograph This Thing I Want. I Know Not What, inspired by Carson McCuller's novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published by Paper Tiger Books in 2018.
Bowe worked with Lenny Abrahamson on the acclaimed tv series Normal People. Bowe was the winner of the National Gallery of Ireland Zurich Portrait Prize 2019.
