The Landing Light

On 21 March 2020, as the UK entered its first lockdown, I packed my belongings into three bags and left London, my home for thirty years, returning to Ireland without knowing when I might see the city again. I travelled to a small village in County Clare, where I made these photographs between April and August, within the two-kilometre radius imposed by lockdown restrictions.

Photographing people at their homes, I became attentive to the quiet, domestic moments that came to define this time. Initially, I worked from outside, looking in through windows, observing lives temporarily confined to their own spaces. As restrictions eased, I was eventually able to photograph a family gathering indoors again, after three months of separation.

I wanted the photographs to hold something of the stillness and uncertainty of those months, to feel like fragments of a story, suspended between one moment and the next. I was drawn to the poetry of ordinary life and to the paintings of Vermeer, whose treatment of light and domestic interiors allows everyday gestures and encounters to take on a quiet intensity and deeper resonance.

The Landing Light became a portrait of a particular moment in time, but also of something more enduring: the emotional lives carried on within our homes, the intimacy of our relationships and the significance of simply being together. Each photograph holds a small part of a larger, unfinished story.