Stone angels

“I photographed many of the stone angels in St Finbarre’s Cemetery. I’m sure the monument maker had a thought to that if you put a statue on top of a pedestal, you had a connection to a divinity, a connection to Heaven perhaps. My photographs try to honour this idea. I took them at low angles and tried to give them a weightlessness, which as stone statues they obviously don’t possess. I point towards their spirituality, what they are trying to represent. I photographed them against the sky. This was an attempt to enliven the statues using light and composition.

“Some of the memorials would have been made and erected at great cost and others are very simple and humble but they have the same level of poignancy, regardless of their expense. One of the largest crosses in St Finbarre’s Cemetery is to a bishop. It is some fifteen feet tall and very imposing. In the exhibition I’ve counterpointed this with a photograph of rusting cross in the grass. People are welcome to speculate on the impact of their memorials. The tiny crosses to me are far more moving than the large cross-costing hundreds or thousands of pounds.

“What also struck me are the number of monuments that have the name of the person responsible for the construction in larger emphasis than that to whom it is dedicated to. I suppose some of the key questions in this exhibition is who are we memorialising?

“Are they for ourselves or for those who have passed away?”.

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