The fragile worlds we create

BORN IN the United States, Jackie Nickerson is a much-travelled photographer who has spent time in southern Africa and Europe. Since settling in rural Ireland, she has made two substantial bodies of work specifically about her adoptive home: Faith, which documents Catholic religious orders throughout the country, and Ten Miles Round, an exploration of her immediate townland in Co Louth.

Portraits are central to both projects and to much of what she does. Faith is published in book form by Steidl. Her earlier book, Farm, explores the world of itinerant farm labourers in southern Africa.

In keeping with a major strand of contemporary photographic practice, Nickerson aims to sidestep pictorial formulae and conventions. That is not to say that her work is not well made – it's technically flawless – or that she ignores the history of visual culture. The photographs in Faith, for example, are clearly informed by early Renaissance painting. But rather than trying to make a photojournalistic image, a picture that tells a story in an effective though predictable way, she tries to depict the everyday, a reality that we take for granted and do not think of as being particularly noteworthy.

Her new exhibition, The Past is Another Country, at the Millennium Court arts centre in Portadown, covers a lot of ground, and not just geographically. It features photographs from China, Japan, Qatar and Oman. In each case, a distinctive location and population is represented and, to a significant extent, Nickerson's concerns have to do with place, identity, tradition and modernity. Given those concerns, her show is particularly interesting in relation to its immediate context.

During the Troubles, the politics of identity in Northern Ireland crystalised to an almost unimaginable degree in Portadown. Year after year, the world’s media flocked to the town to report on the increasingly nasty, lethal confrontations that attended the Orange Order’s annual Drumcree parade. Only in the past decade, as in much of Northern Ireland, has relative calm prevailed.

The title of Nickerson's show is a familiar expression that derives from the first sentence of LP Hartley's novel The Go-Between. Hartley's main theme, in this and other of his books, is how past events, usually enacted within strict social frameworks, blight present lives. In The Go-Between, for example, the characters live within a class system that is effectively invisible to them. It is their everyday reality. But it colours their relationships and is ultimately disastrous.

Nickerson is interested in rendering visible this usually invisible sense of the everyday.

THE EXHIBITION WAS originated by Jackie Barker and Marietheres Damm at the Millennium Court. Rather than directly addressing the locality and its history, they and the artist have opted to place depictions of other, distant places and cultures in Portadown. One effect of the work is that it prompts us to consider the immediate civic space beyond the confines of the gallery.

A recurrent idea that comes across in the photographs in the exhibition is that we construct the worlds in which we live. It is done literally in terms of bricks and mortar, and figuratively, we construct collectively a social, cultural and political reality that becomes integral to our identity. It can be a prison, however.

Construction is a trope in Nickerson’s photographs. In images from Qatar and Oman, there is a pervasive sense of walled-off worlds. In the 12 images that make up the composite Landscape, myriad built enclosures are blankly, multiply screened, giving away as little information as possible. This is both functional in the harsh desert terrain, and cultural, designed to screen and preserve what is within, to prevent outside contagion of any kind.

A Bedouin dwelling is a tightly organised structure of windbreaks. It is, Nickerson notes, a second wife’s house, separate from the main house. The woman will never be seen by visitors. Yet in the wider context, the outside impinges, inherited identities are put under pressure, and can change. A veiled bride holds a bunch of imported lilies; a vast supermarket is stocked with banks of consumer goods; and the infrastructure of communications – airports, roads, television and mobile phone networks — promise circulation.

China features as a place in a state of uncertain flux. In a Shanghai supermarket, a young woman wearing a hygiene mask maintains a sales patter via a mouthpiece while dispensing instant noodles. Members of a Chinese opera troupe apply make-up backstage, poised between past and present, assuming the mask of tradition but sporting the iconography of Western pop culture on their T-shirts. A similarly promiscuous mix of cultural signs is found on the city streets.

On a shore north of Tokyo, fishermen have constructed makeshift though often elaborate shacks. Handmade and weather-beaten, they are at variance with any predictable notions of Japanese technology. These photographs were taken in 2006.

Given what has happened along the coastline since then, the fishermen’s improvised shelters now appear desperately vulnerable, as with any culture’s assertive but, in the end, fragile house of cards.

The Past is Another CountryPhotographs by Jackie Nickerson. Millennium Court Arts Centre, William St, Portadown. Until June 25