Ivan McMahon​​​​​​​-Visual Artist
Film & Photography​​​
BIOGRAPHY
Ivan McMahon has been working in the Film and Television Industry for over thirty years both at home and abroad. He has worked on many well-known national and international feature films and TV Dramas as well as having written, produced and directed a number of short films and online dramas that have been screened from Washington DC to Tehran and the Aran Islands in-between.
Ivan has also tutored in scriptwriting, visual storytelling and alternative narrative at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
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ARTISTIC INTENT
Having grown up along the wild and dramatic west coast of Ireland I have held a lifelong love and fascination with the landscape of this exposed and rugged part of the world.
Exploring the transcendent terrain, sculpted as it is by the dynamic North Atlantic I study its tones and textures in a bid to glean a sense of it’s fundamental essence; the primordial energy that emanates from it’s crags and fissures. Creating semi-Through these semi-abstract impressions of this harsh yet beautiful land I endeavour to understand how it can act as an archive of lost human memory, dreams and emotions. I strive to comprehend how it has moulded the psyche of those who once inhabited this haunting landscape and how it can still influence those who continue to do so.
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METHODOLOGY
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Each image, as I’m studying it, reveals its true meaning, rather than trying to find an image to suit a pre-ordained intent I let the senses unfurl, the lens becomes a window into an alternative reality, a different plain on which to explore new ways to experience and contemplate human existence. But this is not an arbitrary process, the picture's meaning has always been there, embedded in the image, an evident purpose waiting to be revealed through whispers from its fleeting spirit held and preserved at that moment, that one moment in time when the shutter clicks. The spirit threads a tale, an unconscious value that takes conscious form and articulates itself in these manifest images garnered from the landscape and objects within..By ascribing a cinematic narrative, utilising a montage approach to each project to draw inferences to the overall theme, I also want to invite the viewer to engage on a subjective level, to let the material speak to them. I want to evoke a personal response in order for the viewer to explore their own intimate memories; a source of inestimable perspicacity.
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