Jan McCullough

Based in her native Northern Ireland, Jan McCullough completed a BA in Photography at the University of Ulster in 2013. She has shown her work widely in Ireland, the UK, and internationally. Recently-completed commissions have explored photography’s role in making visible previously unseen hierarchies of labour, and celebrating this formal acknowledgement.

She is fascinated with untold histories of labour and care; acts of construction, fabrication and DIY; and the communities of interest and place that form around them. By employing the materials and formal languages associated with these activities to create sculptural installations informed by photography, her practice considers how the invisible labour and evocative gestures of ordinary people, the objects they produce, and everyday spaces where they work, can be represented. Recent project Night Class (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 2024) mined the gallery archive’s register of technical classes – which often took place at night and were largely excluded from the institution’s established history – and traces of maintenance work carried out on the fabric of the building over many decades by skilled technicians and caretakers. For Jigs (commissioned by Household, 2024) she collaborated with a number of fabricators – including scenic construction workers from the film and TV industry – to create and photograph a series of small-scale temporary landscapes.

Jan McCullough applied for a Golden Fleece Award to focus on an exploration of ideas and work made in response to the under-appreciated and unseen presence of workers. Funding would facilitate a year-long residency and collaboration with scenic carpenters, leading to the development of a new large-scale sculptural installation informed by photography.