Introducing this year’s artists nominated by PhotoIreland to the Creative Europe FUTURES Platform. Aside from the five artists announced this year, PhotoIreland has put forward 20 artists in previous years, selected through direct invitation and an open call. Find out more at futures-photography.com Patrick O'Byrne is a visual artist and writer from Tallaght, Dublin, currently based in Berlin.m His work focuses on the familial and the themes which inhabit it, finding himself drawn to the distinctions and collaborations between people and place. His relationship to photography finds itself inhabited within time and memory, using it as a device to explore the past in some attempt to reconcile with his own self-identity. I'll Be Damned is a project which at its core documents the artist’s father's childhood through the use of found imagery, letters and other artefacts alongside Patrick’s own photographic work. Baring witness to the grip that both alcoholism and the Catholic church had on the country at the time, the artist surveyed the area in which he called home in an attempt to traverse the trials and tribulations of a young boy during a time where existence is ever fleeting. The project deals with masculinity, existentialism and sexual identity. The work attempts to dissolve the transitional period between boyhood and manhood, exposing its fragility and eventual dissipation. It primarily focuses on a point in the father’s life filled with trauma. Firstly, the sexual abuse he was subjected to under the Catholic church at the age of 12 and secondly the trauma related to his father’s alcoholism and its place within the family home. . . . #PhotoIreland #Ireland #IrishCulture #IrishArtists #IrishPhotography #ContemporaryPhotography #ContemporaryArt #ContemporaryIreland #FuturesPhotography