Through a camera lens the world becomes a much more validating and compassionate place. The ability to get up close yet allowing the camera body to act as a tangible boundary – helps put safe distance to the inner workings of your own mind. We are human projectors – our minds creating still and moving images that form a narrative unique to our individual conditioning and experiences of the world. Layer on emotional instability and you get distortion of that narrative with outwardly still images suddenly becoming unquiet and provoking — and as a photographer I manipulate constant, scratching away at the surface until I and the image can withstand no more rawness.

THE EDGE

‘On the edge I live, unbalanced and faltered, courting death with each shallow breath.’

ELECTRIC FENCE

‘Skin that live, can bear so much, of this current world, that’s way out of touch.’

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

‘Look  through here, that dark little window, the world so fixed when reality is blurred. The world needs a spectacle and is blind to the pain – how focused we are, dying to stay sane.’

Grace C. Vaughan is a writer and photographer who grew up in Emyvale, a small border village in Co. Monaghan. Having lived and worked in Dublin for many years she now resides in the Royal County of Meath with her photographer/videographer husband Emmett, daughter Minnie, son Charlie and dog, Frank. With an MA in Scriptwriting from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art & Design, Dublin, her work published includes a children’s book and articles with The Irish Independent and The Journal.