John Duncan: Bonfires

Bonfires, produced over three years, documents a long-standing tradition of bonfire building by Protestant communities in Belfast. The bonfires are built in preparation for the annual 11th July celebrations, which commemorate the defeat of James Stuart at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The imposing bonfire structures are a powerful provocation with which Protestant identity is asserted and a sense of solidarity and continuity is re-affirmed.

Duncan’s photographs frame and measure the structures against their various social settings, revealing both a sense of Belfast’s changing urban landscape and the deep divisions that, despite political progress, still affect Northern Ireland long after the ceasefires. The bonfires have recently been challenged from a number of quarters: from within the Protestant community for damage caused to property and surrounding areas; from developers who covet the waste land they are built on; and from environmentalists who express concerns about the pollution they cause. Seen against this backdrop of competing agendas, the bonfires come to express a form of resistance, and their building a kind of raw ingenuity.

Duncan’s work dwells on the fact that each bonfire has a singular structure, an identity. They are sculptural and architectural oddities with many resonances through history and art, from high-rise flats to military watchtowers and gun emplacements, from the Empire State Building to the Tower of Babel. Duncan’s photographs are alive to these broader themes and their various photographic connections, for example, with Bernd and Hilla Becher’s meticulous documenting of industrial architecture. But the typological aspects of the work are just one of its many rich undercurrents, never diminishing the primary impact of the photographs or the importance of the social and political reality that they confront head on.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY John Duncan was born and lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied Documentary Photography at Newport, Wales and Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art. Since 1994 he has co-edited Source photographic magazine. His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions including, Imago, Centre of Photography Salamanca 1997, Stills Gallery Edinburgh 1998, On the Bright Side of Life, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst Berlin 1998, Gallery of Photography Dublin 2002, Belfast Exposed 2003, Photography Towards a Sculptural Impulse, Dazibao Montréal 2006, Gimpel Fils London 2006, East, Norwich Gallery 2006, Loaded Landscapes, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago 2007.

John Duncan: Bonfires

artist:
John Duncan [UK]