Lorna O Brien-Opaque

There Are Two Sides is a photographic landscape study that traces the slow unraveling of a long term relationship. Rather than documenting people directly, the work uses landscape as an emotional and psychological register. The experience of relational loss often operates beyond logic or chronology, and landscape, with its opacity and mutability, offers a visual language capable of holding this uncertainty. Like love, landscape resists fixed meaning. It shifts, erodes, and reforms over time.

The word landscape derives from the Dutch term landschap and the German landschaften, both of which originally referred not to scenery but to land shaped through human interaction. These terms described inhabited, worked, and altered terrain, places marked by use, memory, and labour. Landscape was never neutral or untouched. It was a record of lived presence. This historical understanding is central to the work. While the west of Ireland is often perceived as wild or pristine, it is deeply inscribed by human absence and intervention, by abandonment, agriculture, migration, and emotional inheritance. Its power lies in this tension between visibility and erasure.

This body of work operates as a phenomenological inquiry, where meaning emerges not through intention but through experience and later reflection. At the time of making the photographs, I did not consciously understand how these landscapes mirrored the emotional state of the relationship. It was only through distance and introspection that their resonance became clear. The landscapes became sites of projection, holding emotions that could not yet be articulated.

The images, largely made in the west of Ireland, are quiet and opaque. They often deny the viewer a clear vanishing point or visual resolution. These obscured spaces echo the emotional terrain of the relationship itself, a shared journey without a shared destination. The photos were taken side by side but looking at different horizons. While the landscapes are separate views, they are bound by a sense of emptiness and dissonance, reflecting two individuals moving through the same space with diverging intentions.

The seascapes function differently within the work. Unlike land, the sea resists ownership and control. It embodies inevitability, freedom, and perpetual motion. Where the land feels held and constrained, the sea remains open and indifferent. These images acknowledge forces beyond human negotiation, moments where acceptance replaces resistance.

The photographs were made over a four year period during the gradual dissolution of the relationship. Time is embedded within them, not as narrative progression but as emotional sediment. Together, the images form a visual meditation on intimacy, separation, and the ways in which place absorbs and reflects private experience. The work suggests that landscapes do not simply mirror emotion, but actively participate in how loss is felt, remembered, and eventually understood.

There are two sides

There Are Two Sides is a photographic landscape study that examines separation as a conscious act rather than a gradual unraveling. The work traces the moment when a long-term relationship becomes defined by clarity instead of ambiguity, by decision rather than drift. Rather than using landscape as a space of emotional projection, the images approach it as a site of resolution. Separation here is not experienced as disorientation or loss beyond language, but as an event that can be recognized, named, and located in time. The photographs do not search for meaning; they assert it.

In contrast to approaches that rely on metaphor or displacement, this work refuses opacity. Landscape does not stand in for psychological complexity but exists as an external reality, distinct from inner experience. Emotion is not embedded in the terrain but held apart from it. Separation is understood not as something that exceeds logic, but as something that demands it. The land remains stable, legible, and self-contained, offering firmness rather than uncertainty. Where love once appeared mutable, its ending here is definitive.

The historical conception of landscape as land shaped through human interaction is deliberately bracketed. Rather than emphasizing traces of inhabitation, labor, or memory, the work treats landscape as emptied of relational residue. The west of Ireland, often read through narratives of abandonment, inheritance, or emotional haunting, is presented as disengaged and indifferent. It does not absorb personal history; it releases it. The land does not remember. Its significance lies in its refusal to hold what no longer belongs to it.

Visually, the images are structured and resolved. Clear horizons, defined boundaries, and deliberate compositions assert division rather than ambiguity. Space is not shared but partitioned. The photographs establish distance between foreground and background, between viewer and subject, between one frame and the next. These are not parallel journeys unfolding unknowingly; they are divergent paths that no longer intersect. The act of looking is solitary and self-contained.

The seascapes operate as points of finality rather than openness. Unlike the land, which retains form and boundary, the sea marks the absolute limit of return. It does not suggest freedom or acceptance, but conclusion. Its surface offers no negotiation, no possibility of re-entry. Where the land affirms separation through distance, the sea affirms it through closure.

The photographs were made over a defined period following the end of the relationship. Time is embedded not as emotional accumulation but as aftermath. There is no sense of erosion or gradual loss; instead, there is the stillness that follows a decisive break. Together, the images form a visual articulation of separation as an act of removal rather than absence. The work proposes that landscapes do not carry the weight of loss but provide the conditions under which detachment becomes possible. Separation, here, is not something the land absorbs; it is something the land allows.