Through photography and textiles, Hazel Coonagh investigates time, memory, and what it means to be human. Raised in Dublin, Coonagh first encountered photography through the family film camera and the images they created within photo albums. Following an accomplished commercial career that saw the artist win awards from the IDI and gain multiple selections from the 100 Archive, Coonagh has shifted to a conceptually-focused fine arts practice.
Her work shows depictions of personal narratives through surreal mixtures of photographed figures and stitched symbolism - houses, animals, patterns and grid systems - to explore themes of female identity, the Irish housing crisis and, more recently, memory construction.
In 2020 Coonagh, driven by a desire to reconnect to her work in a tactile sense, first introduced textiles into her work, incorporating needle and thread into her imagery. Through piercing, stitching and weaving, she combines prints on paper and canvases, reimagining digital photography by pushing it beyond its pixel-based parameters and bringing it into a textured and physical form. This blend of contrasting mediums, highlights how female-centric art forms, that have been practiced by the women in her family for decades, have historically been overlooked.
In her latest work Coonagh uses portraits and locations, colour and grid like frameworks, inspired by Japanese sashiko embroidery, to rebuild recollections commenting on how memory is constructed and held in the mind. Tracking the flow of thoughts in the psyche as it processes the past, seeing each stitch as a unit of time and emotion.