Kathy Browning
Ireland: Giant’s Causeway

I spent 14 days taking 3600 photographs while travelling around the coast of Ireland.
I photographed a lot each day until the camera felt like a prosthetic device on my face, an
extension of my body. It was like my eyes blinking except that I have a photographic digital
record. The art is still in the photographic moment as I know when I have a really great
photograph at the time. This is an exhausting process as I tend to shoot for long hours daily and
I then end up with a lot of photographs to edit. The work load has increased exponentially by
photographing digitally. My photography is slow and meticulous.

I spent months looking at and editing my Ireland photographs. This included the amazing
lush green landscapes of rolling hills full of sheep, cliffs, rugged shore lines, sandy beaches,
castles, and incredible architecture in ancient and pre-historic cities. This is a part of my cultural
heritage. Giant’s Causeway is a part of a photographic series which is a merging of my artistic
and academic skills as a visual arts researcher. It was similar to grounded theory (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967) that I use for my academic research wherein I let the field of study speak to me.
I did not approach it with a preconceived idea nor did I pose a question that I needed to answer
but went out daily and photographed. I let Ireland tell me what photographs needed to be
taken and my photographic eye knew when to take the photograph from my years of
experience as a photographer.

Each of the photographs that you will view have a story that is told visually. As I was
continuously editing my photographs for months while making files in folders I asked myself:
What was my experience of Ireland? How can I represent this experience so that it has the
feeling of what each inspiring photograph had when I took the shot? It was a reliving and
recreating of experience while working with specialty silver papers and creating triptychs,
diptychs and other layouts to photographically tell the stories. I did more straight photography
than I did in my last several series as it is what this Ireland exhibition required. The 18 limited
edition colour archival quality giclée photographic prints are the result of my photographic
Ireland experience.

Bio
Kathy Browning is an Artist and an Art Educator. She has a Ph.D. and B.Ed. from University of
Toronto, an M.F.A. from York University, and a B.F.A. Honours from the University of Manitoba.
Kathy has taught Visual Arts and Technology at the elementary, secondary, and university
levels. She has shown artwork in all art media in Canada and the United States. Kathy has
received provincial and national awards and recognitions for art, videos, art education, writing,
publishing, and editing. Kathy’s giclée photographic prints are on archival paper in editions of
10.

Please see the following URLs for Kathy’s website and video
https://laurentian.ca/videos-visual-artists-greater-sudbury
www.northernartistsgallery.ca/member/kathy-browning/