In association with Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival 2025, Lavit Gallery hosts a unique presentation of Paul Gaffney’s experimental video installation Approaching Stillness.

Over the course of winter nights, under the light of the full moon, the artist explored the Glen of the Downs nature reserve in County Wicklow — one of the few remaining oak woodlands in the east of the country. Using extreme low-light video techniques, he captured the subtle movement of moonlight across the contours of this steep, narrow valley.

The resulting installation is a meditation on the search for balance between stillness and external demands — between the immovable and the constantly shifting, the ancient landscape and the encroaching modern world.

Visitors are invited to enter an intimate, darkened space where they can spend time with the work in solitude — fully immersed and free from distraction.

This project was made with the support of an Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary and a Wicklow Arts Office Strategic Projects Award. Additional support for the exhibition has been provided by MTU Arts Office, Sounds from a Safe Harbour and Lavit Gallery.

Paul Gaffney is a visual artist based in Cork. His practice and PhD research explore different ways of experiencing and representing landscape and seeks to translate an experience of multisensorial engagement with, and movement through, the landscape.

His work has received a number of awards including the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award and Visual Arts Bursaries, the FSAS Digital Media Award, and a Strategic Projects Award from Wicklow County Council, and has been nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and Prix Pictet.

His publications are held in a number of artists’ books collections worldwide, and have been selected for the Kassel Photobook Award (2013 & 2016) and shortlisted for the European Publishers Award for Photography.

Gaffney’s work has also been presented as solo exhibitions at Belfast Exposed, Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (Luxembourg), Ffotogallery (Cardiff), Flowers Gallery (London), Oliver Sears Gallery (Dublin), Photo Museum Ireland (Dublin), PS2 (Belfast) and in group shows and festivals in Australia, China, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the US and UK.

“Gaffney’s photographs emerge out of intuition, coincidence, and an underlying longing for connection and stillness. And although it’s tempting to call them landscapes, they are created through different ways of knowing a place – ways that acknowledge the moving, feeling body, rather than the distanced and distancing eye, as the foundation of our experience.” Eugenie Shinkle – Reader in Photography, University of Westminster