Harry Moore wears many hats. The Cork-based artist works in performance, video, photography and print, and he has been a stalwart of experimental music groups such as the Quiet Club and the Sonic Vigil festivals of improvised music over many years.
As a photographer, Moore is best known for the striking images he creates with his handmade pinhole cameras. Studio, his upcoming exhibition at the new Quay Co-op Gallery on Sullivan’s Quay, features a series of pinhole photographs taken in artists’ studios around Cork city and county.
“This is a project I started before COVID,” he says. “I had to let it slide for a while, or course, but I picked it up again afterwards. I visit the artists in their studios and talk with them. You’re capturing not so much a documentation of the space, it’s more like you’re catching its aura.
“Very few of the artists actually appear in the images, unless they’re sitting down. One of those who does appear is Eileen Healy, working with a model. And in this case, the model was me. Because we were both pretty stationary, we’re very clearly visible and identifiable in the photograph. Another one I’ve included is from the Crawford College of Art, where Eileen teaches a life drawing class. There were, I think, about eight or ten students all around the model, drawing or painting. And because they’re stationary at their easels, they’re fairly visible and discernible.” The more artists he visited, the more Moore could appreciate how their interests shape the spaces they work in.
“If you’re in with an artist who’s doing very, very precise work, the studio tends to be very, very precise,” he says. “If you look at Ita Freeney’s studio, for instance, it’s very bare and simple and tidy. And her work is the same; her paintings are like collected shapes, even though they’re landscapes. And there’s an aura of that work in her studio.” Some of the artists whose studios he has photographed, along with Freeney and Healy, include Tom Climent, Serge le Belge, Tom Doig, Rosie O’Regan and Donna Coogan.
“I’m not sure how many images I can show at the exhibition, but I have photographed outside Cork city as well, in Lucy Phelan and Noelle Noonan’s studios, for instance. If there’s room, I’ll include those images too.”
Moore was born in Zambia and studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. After moving to Cork, he taught photography at St John’s Central College on Sawmill St until his retirement. He began experimenting with pinhole photography while a student at the Slade, and remains fascinated by the process.
“I suppose the attraction is that there’s this sort of artisan element to it,” he says. “You can make the cameras out of shoeboxes or coffee tins, or those tubes you get with whiskey bottles. I just like the idea of minimal technology, I suppose. Next month, for instance, I’ll be running a workshop at Bere Island Arts Festival, and we’ll use tin cans and shoeboxes.
“Pinhole photography is a very rudimentary process, very touch and go. When you’re trying to work out the exposure, you have a look at the weather and say, maybe give it ten minutes, and then the sun comes out and you go, maybe we’ll make it five minutes or two minutes instead. I like the idea that the process is so hands-on. It’s very tactile. And then there’s still something quite magical about seeing the image appear on the piece of blank paper once it’s in the developer.” Moore has used a standard size for the prints in the Studio exhibition.
“They’re all 30 inches top to bottom, by 13 and a half inches wide. I like that format because it’s like a person is in front of you when you’re looking at the image. Your eyes are going up and down, and you can more or less have a conversation with it.” Moore’s friend Suzy O’Mullane will perform at his exhibition opening this Friday evening. “I’ve known Suzy for years,” he says. “She’s from Cork, but she’s living in France now. I went over to Paris some time ago to take pinhole photographs of a studio she set up in what used to be a shop. She’s moved since, to a place near Perpignan, and she wanted to do a performance there, called My dress is paper but I am the paper. She was on a trip home when we met at a pro-Palestine march. We talked about what sounds she might use for the performance, and I made some suggestions. Then we came back to my little attic studio here and made a sound piece that she could use.
“Then I thought, well, I have to go and see this performance. So I went over to France, and I did the sound for her there. Suzy introduced me to the people who were organising the event, and they said, would you come and show with us? So then, when Suzy did another performance, just over the border in Catalonia, I exhibited my pinholes. That was really exciting. After that, I said, come on, you have to perform at the Quay Co-op in Cork.” The new gallery at the Co-op is downstairs, and is accessed through the bookshop. “I saw a show there by a local artist, Lesley Allen Spillane, and I just thought, gosh, this is a lovely space. It suits work like this, that’s kind of fragile, and it’s got very good light. I spoke with Eve O’Riordan, who’s running the gallery. I showed her some of the pinhole photographs, and asked if I could show there, and Eve said, absolutely. How about 23rd of August?.
“So I said, fabulous. And here we are.”
