Gillian Russell

My work this year has been about an old farmhouse in Co. Westmeath. This house has never been redecorated except for the dining room and the hall. No one knows how old it is. The furniture is all ripped and broken, all the curtains have holes in them and all the pictures hang crookedly, in dusty frames draped with cobwebs. The rooms are very big and the windows don’t let in enough light. The house is always cold. Our childhood decorates the rooms.

It is a familiar, personal space and yet there is so much that I don’t know about it. I wonder what the people who lived here before were like and whose bed I am sleeping in? This house haunts me. I feel as though something else is there. My father used to keep sheep in the hall and hens upstairs. Maybe the strange presence is a lamb that died. It is unusual for anyone to live in a house like this that has no heating or new furnishings.

My photographs of this house are suggestive of the people who have lived here in the past, the people who live here now, the mysterious feeling that some ‘other’ is there and the beauty of this worn interior space. Colours and shapes are also important in the composition of each photograph.