Pádraig Spillane works with photography, collage, object-based assemblages, and installation. He explores desire through the intersections of imagery and mass-produced cultural forms. He views images as unstable, to be waywardly rearranged beyond their intended meanings and functions. His works are constructed using visual references from commercial display and collective imaginaries, exploring how images generate desires through their complex entanglements. Reorientating the drives and relations from aesthetic elements to consider suggestive potentials, his works perform as assemblies of disruption and appeal.
Exhibitions include: Future Tense, FORMAT Photography Festival, Derby, UK (2024); In Our Own Image: Photography and the Social Gaze, Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin, (2022); Images Are All We Have, PhotoIreland, Dublin Castle, (2022); define silver lining V2.0, CCAE, Cork, (2022); C L O S E R, Lavit Gallery, Cork (2022); Saturation: the everyday transformed, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, (2022); Silver-Tongued Seas, Jupiter Woods, London, (2021); Far From Here, The Complex, Dublin.
Spillane lives and works in Cork, Ireland. His work features in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection.