ARTIST BIO

Ailbhe Greaney is an artist and academic. She is one of the founding members of the Belfast School of Art BA (Hons) and MFA Photography Degree Programme. Ailbhe is a graduate of Dublin City University and the School of Visual Arts New York, where she graduated as a Fulbright and Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholar. The recipient of a number of national and international awards, Ailbhe is a Fulbright Commission Award Review Panel Member, Board Member of Young At Art and External Examiner at both Falmouth University and Munster Technological University. Ailbhe has previously held positions at The Guggenheim Museum New York, Blind Spot Magazine, Lux Imaging, Here Is New York and SVA. Her work has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally, within institutions such as Aperture Foundation New York, Belfast Photo Festival, CCI Paris, EVA International, Fast Forward Women in Photography, Format Festival, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast, PhotoIreland, Photo Museum Ireland, SPE, Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool. 

Ailbhe’s work The Light Beautiful attempts to bring the outside inside, to make exterior the interior. It reflects upon the feeling OSCAR Wilde had for light, communicated to us via Kevin O’Brien’s ‘The House Beautiful: A Reconstruction of Wilde’s American Lecture’. Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ also serve to underpin the concepts embodied by The Light Beautiful.

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky

from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, Oscar Wilde, 1897.