PHILIP ARNEILL

In 1960, when talking about the evolution of his musical practice, legendary American jazz musician John Coltrane declared, “I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.” I returned to live in Northern Ireland, 30 years after leaving, to find it both familiar and alien. Using photography as my research tool, my research will examine the relationship between my own inherited Protestant identity and Orange Halls, which exist as distinct, outward markers of an Irish Protestantism into which I was born, but that is now increasingly out of step with a more diverse and secular society. The result will be a photographic and text-based archive that will take both traditional and more interpretive approaches. Combining photographs with a mixture of academic and semi-fictional writing, it will create a body of work that occupies a liminal space between objective archive and subjective record.