BJØRKA

Bjørkamedlem Katharine Mac Daids utstilling åpner på Visningsrommet USF i Bergen fredag 12. september kl. 18 – 20 og står til 21. september 2025.
Åpningstider alle dager kl. 12 – 16, unntatt mandag som er stengt. Langåpent torsdag fra kl. 14 – 20.

When Will We Be Married is an ongoing body of work from Northern Ireland about the ties between family, landscape and the uneasy longing for home.

For Norsk Foto #8, I will present two works from the series, an installation of portraits from My Mother, Kate, alongside a set of large-scale diptychs from Ulaidh (Ulster).

My mother grew up in protestant east Belfast and my father was raised catholic in Derry. Their interfaith relationship caused profound unease within each family, and traces of this tension are bound into a landscape that for me is both familiar and strange.

My father’s job meant that we moved around a lot, and my childhood was disjointed.

Growing up in the Sultanate of Oman and America, with brief interludes back at my Nana’s house in Belfast, I developed no definitive sense of belonging.

To some extent, I have inherited an identity I have no ownership of. Kate, my mother, carries her reserved background with her, it’s who she is and how she relates to the world, how she relates to me.

This critical relationship with my mother has had a fundamental impact on my own relationship with the world, and in photographing both these embodiments of ‘home’, my mother and the landscape, I’m making material an uneasy longing for intimacy.

The use of photography has allowed me to both physically and metaphorically seek out my severed roots, while the more I photograph my mother, the less remote she becomes.

Katharine Mac Daid was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and grew up in the Middle East, America, Northern Ireland, and England. Since graduating with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London, Katharine has spent time teaching photography in the Sultanate of Oman and England. She has recently relocated to Norway where she is a member of Stiftelsen Bjørka, a collective of analogue artists in Oslo.

Her project from Northern Ireland, The Black Dreams, intersects with her series My Mother, Kate, in which she continues to seek out her Irish identity.

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