Dúlra Photography

FOREWORD by Michael Viney

Daragh Muldowney’s exquisite images speak first to the thrill of discovery shared by anyone whose childhood included rockpools – the first encounter with a truly wild world. Probing under ledges with a prawn-net in the chalky, inter-tidal labyrinths of the east Sussex coast, the shocking pink of crusting coralline algae was, for me, part of an enchanting mystery. Now, on Ireland’s west coast, knowledge is matched to metaphor in the glowing lining of jewellery boxes.

Daragh’s immaculate photographs prompt new thoughts on the relationship between art and nature, ever-changing in culture from the earliest cave paintings, through the haunted fantasies of medieval illustrators, to the progressively more exact marriages of nature and art in painting as natural history. Daragh’s images move far on from mere capture of the real. His is an artist’s eye – his brilliant selection, composition, the planes of texture and colour all appeal to aesthetic sensibilities fostered and distilled by today’s abstract art. These photographs are remarkable and beautiful – and first of all as works of art.

Their creation, however, is totally bonded to a personal experience of nature, to the sea-shore as a place of excitement and revelation, and to the dynamic and myriad forms and materials of marine life. The curl of a kelp frond, barely glimpsed above the water, is first a flowing image, but also the unlocking of knowledge about kelp as pliant, slippery and laminar in its dance within the waves. His gloriously green-mantled limpets are first of all fretted and delicate stars but then squat, tough veterans of pressure-per-square-centimetre. The elegant calligraphy of a William Morris wallpaper resolves into the companionable trails of grazing periwinkles.

The beauties of Ireland have traditionally rested on the huge scale of landscapes and seascapes: now we are learning to look deeper and closer – to the heart of flowers, embroidery of lichens, enamelling of butterfly wings. The intimate beauties of marine life, so accessily on offer in the rim between the tides, have found a gifted jeweller in the photographic art of Daragh Muldowney.

Michael Viney
Ireland’s Ocean: A Natural History, by Michael and Ethna Viney, is published by The Collins Press.