Pauline Rowan

For 18 months, I worked closely with a small community of people and their relationship to a deconsecrated convent and its abandoned gardens, all of which were marked for demolition. My collaborators consisted of the convents’ transient residents and its previously evicted nuns. The project looks at our relationship to home, primarily the garden, and our cultural repetition of the need to control land. It also considers the struggle and acceptance of those people involved, all knowing that their home and sanctuary would be soon destroyed.

Pauline Rowan is an Irish visual artist who works predominately in photography. Works often explore the relationships between cultural, ritualistic symbolism and individual perceptions of reality. Her focus begins rooted in place and personal experience transforming through investigation. Utilising photography, participation, performative and material construction, she addresses ritual, motherhood, conflicting experiences of belonging and home.

Rowan was awarded an MFA in Photography with distinction from Ulster University in 2019. She was nominated by PhotoIreland for the FUTURES Photography programme and was selected by an international jury for New Irish Works. She participated in Photo Museum Ireland’s In our Image: Photography & the Social Gaze which touched on the most pressing issues around Irish identity and history, coming to terms with the legacies of the past and the challenges of the future.