Planted, poured or painted

The built environment is a broad church. It takes in the permanent and the temporary, the monumental and the quietly considered, the lovingly landscaped and the gloriously eccentric.

The architecture background helps here more than anywhere, I enjoy design massively. And I reckon I a good grasp of space — its relationships, and flow; what the designer was reaching for.

The relationship between a building and its setting, between hard landscape and soft, between what’s built and what’s grown — these are things I genuinely notice, and they end up in the photographs. Urban, planted, organic and hard edged.

Space, Light, and the Stuff In Between

Parks and public realm, urban planting schemes, mature gardens, designed landscapes — this is work I actively enjoy, which probably shows.

The temporary stuff is just as interesting. Set design, pop-up structures, installations, exhibition spaces, fleeting buildings that exist for a weekend and then they’re gone. There’s a particular urgency to photographing something that’s only there briefly — you get one pass at it, in whatever light you’re given, and that’s the record. I like that constraint. It focuses the mind.

Space, Light, and the Stuff In Between

Colour and light are where a lot of this lives. The way a rendered facade reads in morning light versus the afternoon. The shadow a canopy throws at midsummer. It can be the moment a park catches the low winter sun and everything goes amber and long. These aren’t things you manufacture — you plan for them, you wait for them, sometimes you come back for them.

The work covers architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, public realm, parks, estates, gardens, designed outdoor spaces, temporary structures, pavilions, and installations. Commercial clients, public bodies, designers, developers, and the occasional very enthusiastic garden owner.

If it’s been designed — or planted, or grown, or constructed for a fortnight — it’s probably worth a proper photograph.

Dublin and beyond. Boots usually required.