Clare Gallagher is a still life photographer based in Ireland. You might remember her work from Issue five of oh comely where we featured images from her Domestic Drift series. She photographs the quiet moments of everyday life: the shadows, patterns of light and familiar objects that have a simple beauty about them, if only we stopped to notice it. 

Clare's most recent photographic series is called Verges, where her subject is weeds and overgrown city plants. They're the sort of botanicals that no one cares too much about but under Clare's lens, become full of life and characterful disorder.

What were your initial points of reference for the Verges series?

My garden (with chickens, veg and lots of weeds), seeing my kids create little worlds for themselves with unprepossessing materials, memories from my childhood when anything could be fascinating, and ideas about impermanence and equanimity: everything changes, nothing is permanent. 

What's your working process? Do you spend a lot of time searching out locations?

I wanted to look hard at the most banal surroundings I could imagine – the ones that are so familiar that it’s hard to even see them at all. I limit myself to only photographing the places I see everyday when I'm walking the kids to school, on the way to work, or in the supermarket car park. If I photographed places that had a sense of excitement or novelty to me, I feel like I would be cheating.

What is it about overlooked, everyday places that catches your eye and curiosity?

The landscape, both urban and rural, is becoming so manipulated and stage-managed that it is difficult to find any wilderness at all. For me, urban weeds express a little of that wildness, creating pockets of growing, flowering, propagating and decaying life, where it’s not supposed to be.

I think that photography is often entwined in a search for the exotic or dramatic: special moments that seem remarkable enough to be recorded. So much of contemporary life is driven towards the pursuit of the extraordinary, shiny and new that there are whole chunks of life – the ordinary, everyday, mundane parts that take up most of our existence – that don’t get recognised for their value to our lives. To a large extent, capitalism is responsible by generating dissatisfaction with what we have and breeding desire for what is new. I believe that the potential for resistance to that is all around us. The challenge is in really seeing what’s already there.

Verges is a work in progress but what will be the finish to the series? 

My intention is for the shooting to take place over an entire year, to record the transformation and transience of the plants and the actions to constrain them. After photographing so intensively in such a confined space in Domestic Drift, my last project, I really wanted to get out more! I don’t however think of them as quite separate – to me home and urban landscape are subjects whose very proximity makes them difficult to really look at.

If you'd like to know more about Clare's work, head to her website.