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Clare Gallagher

@clare_gallagher_

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Artist - Academic - Mother - Irish
📚Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity, Bloomsbury, out in paperback in June
📚The Second Shift, last copies

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I’m delighted to invite you to a lunchtime talk to mark the launch of my new book Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity, at 12.30pm on Saturday 6th June at Belfast Exposed Gallery as part of Belfast Photo Festival.

I will be in conversation with the wonderful Liza Thompson, Senior Publisher at Bloomsbury, talking domestic struggle, art as resistance, solidarity, and visibility.

Home is a space shaped by emotion, expectation and contradiction. It can offer comfort, care and belonging, but it can also feel oppressive, unequal or out of reach. This talk will explore some of the many dimensions of domestic life,and ask what it means to inhabit home physically, emotionally and socially. Is home a sanctuary, a workplace, or a site of struggle? Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity invites you to rethink this deeply familiar yet elusive space, tracing the hidden histories, emotions and tensions that exist within it, and challenging what is overlooked, normalised or left unseen.

Saturday 6th June
12.30-1.30pm
Belfast Exposed Gallery
Donegall St
Free event, all welcome!

***OUT IN PAPERBACK JUNE 2027, AVAILABLE TO PREORDER NOW***

#subversivemothers #disturbingdomesticity #motherartist #artasresistance
@lizajthompson @bx_gallery @belfastphotofestival @belfastschoolofart
📷 @john_spinks taken in Belfast Exposed Photography Gallery by @clare_gallagher_

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5 months ago

Mother’s Day… One day a year can’t begin to say enough about motherhood, not about the value and certainly not about how hard it can be. So here’s to the women that raised us, here’s to those muddling along, here’s to those who motherhood has eluded, here’s to those forced into it, here’s to those feeling loss, here’s to those women mothering under difficult or traumatic circumstances. Solidarity with you all ❤️ #mothersday taken in Northern Ireland by @clare_gallagher_

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5 years ago

Over the next while I’ll be sharing the final authors on Prince Literary’s inaugural roster. First up is the wonderful Dr Clare Gallagher!

Clare Gallagher is an artist and writer, and a senior lecturer in the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University. Her work explores the intimate terrain of home and women’s lived experience. It attends to the overlooked rhythms of domestic life: the labour of mothering, gestures of care, and the complex emotional landscape of home. Clare’s series The Second Shift was published as a photobook and has been exhibited internationally. Her most recent book, Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Clare’s current work Touch/Hunger moves deeper into the tensions and attachments within relationships of care and intimacy, and the invisible weight of mental and emotional labour. It uses the sense of touch to explore the contradictions of closeness and claustrophobia, and the particular anxiety of maternal love with its fierce attachment and its fear of loss. Touch/Hunger will be exhibited in 2027 as part of Tate’s Artist Rooms.

Fáilte chuig an fhoireann, a Clare, a chara! ✨ by @clare_gallagher_

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a month ago

Summer pics…
A visit to @karen_crennell on her beautiful bit of river
More reading
The sea, always the sea
Zurbaran, Kapoor, Japanese Women Photographers, Mendieta
February 1981, terrible fringe
My mum and grandfather on my parents’ wedding day
The twenty-something bambinos
Missing France… by @clare_gallagher_

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2 months ago

Holiday reading, so far… l loved most of these. Read a few in French and really enjoyed it, despite a nearly 30 year hiatus (thank you @jonathandayman for recommending the brilliant Courir L’Escargot 🙏). Annie Ernaux’ The Use of Photography is one of my favourite books so it was a treat to re-experience it in the original language, and to buy an armful more by her in the local bookshop. NB I quit the Ian McEwan halfway… Looking forward to hearing what you guys thought of these books 🙏 by @clare_gallagher_

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3 months ago

Swimming in the clear waters of the Atlantic, the scent of jasmine and pine trees, long hot days, galettes and cider, books, soft sand… taken in Bretagne, France by @clare_gallagher_

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3 months ago

Beautiful Bretagne… by @clare_gallagher_

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3 months ago

Some week… Watched in horror as Belfast showed its worst side; my fantastic PhD student Dr Niamh Callaghan passed her viva with no corrections (pictured with myself and Dr Noreen Giffney, two very proud supervisors); a huge thank you to the brilliant @lizajthompson and all who came to my book talk @bx_gallery, it sparked some powerful conversations and I’m very grateful; my fab friends @armchairandrocket showed their new film; heard a tree creeper thanks to @karen_crennell and the Merlin bird app; Belfast showed its true spirit in a colossal rally against racism, and the sun finally came out

Pic 3 @dynamitedoherty 🙏 taken in Belfast by @clare_gallagher_

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4 months ago

Belfast, united against racism ✊ taken in Belfast City Hall by @clare_gallagher_

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4 months ago

Happy birthday to this guy… a man of deep conversation, lupine eyes, eccentric pronunciation, monkey/ee films, historical tales and gardening gallantry…💙 by @clare_gallagher_

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4 months ago

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us… Question your teaspoons.”

Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire by @clare_gallagher_

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5 months ago

Stopped in my tracks by the bluebells taken in Belfast Lough by @clare_gallagher_

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6 months ago