Aisling McCoy is an Irish visual artist and she is interested in how we inhabit and imagine place. Her background as an architect is central to her practice, which investigates the relationship between architecture and photography, between place making and image making. She sees them as twinned practices; architecture is the translation of an intellectual concept, created through images, into built form, while photography works in the reverse by transforming a space into an image. Both negotiate a balance between the real and the ideal, and both influence how we inhabit – how we make place, and how we construct meaning.
Since graduating with distinction from the MFA Photography programme at the Belfast School of Art in 2015, her work has been exhibited internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award, Visual Arts Bursary Award and Travel and Training Award, the Belfast Exposed/ Seen Fifteen Exhibition Award and the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Project Studio Award. In 2019 she was awarded a 3 month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in association with TBG+S and the Institut Français, selected for PhotoIreland New Irish Works and the Futures Programme at Unseen Amsterdam, and nominated for the Prix Pictet.