Cian Burke

We would always approach the house from the rear, being careful to avoid any stray pieces  of metal that protruded from the walls as we navigated its shell. The building – falling into  ruin as it was being constructed – would provide us a temporary reprieve from the harsh  winds that would often pick up from the east without notice and blow the seeds from their  beds. Shielded from the elements we would run our fingers over the rough concrete surface  of the walls tracing time in the contours of the structure. It was a calm place yet inexplicably  it would fill us with a strange sense of unease and we would never dwell there for long,  always being wary enough to crouch in the shadows of the pillars that rose up like an ancient  stone forest along its flank. The maker of the house would soon return and merge with his  materials and we would leave again, carefully following the ditch into an adjacent field. 

Later, we would find signs and symbols dotted throughout the landscape, that always hinted at a deeper layer of meaning and understanding. The paths that we would meander along  became overgrown and almost impassable, but we struggled on – kicking out at the thick  growth with our boots. Each day as the sun began to withdraw and dance along the hazy  lines of the horizon, we would return to the place we had set out from and construct a  makeshift dwelling from the objects that we found there. Allowing little time to acquaint  ourselves with the night we would fall into a deep slumber, only half disturbed in the almost  blue moonlight by the distant sound of unknown creatures calling out in anguish. It was  during these broken bits of sleep that the dreams would come upon us and fill our minds  with images that seemed to speak of our forebears and the essence of our existence in this  place. We would awake with a light dew clinging to our bodies and with our hearts full of  wonder for the spaces we had spent the night travelling through.

Cian Burke is a photographic artist originally from Dublin, Ireland but now based in Malmö, Sweden. He holds a BA in Fine Art Photography from the Glasgow School of Art and an MFA in Photography from Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Through his work he explores the relationship between art and science ‐ the role imagination plays in both, the manner in which both can be used for the production of knowledge, and as systems for the visualisation of some certain forms of ‘truths’. That the world is not solely understood through pure rational thought processes and the notion that there are rarely any concrete certainties, is something that he continuously investigates and explores within his practice (the appeal of unanswerable questions).