High up on the Wild Atlantic Way
a white crucifix has been hammered into the roadside. After years of rain it has quietly begun to rust. The only people that will see this crucifix are men looking up from their ships out on the Atlantic and travellers on the road. This photograph, the first in Sophie Wedgwood’s drive-by photo series set along the Wild Atlantic Way speaks to the knife-edge kind of feeling of the West Coast. Where one moment it’s a dark storm, the next blinding sun. Where rocks erupt out the farmland and hills splinter off into the sea. Where bleating lambs, famine houses and the rained-on face of the Madonna often streak past your window. Where the lucky and the unlucky, the saved and the damned, the dead and the living live side by side. All this Wedgwood considers in the following photographs.
Somewhere on the West Coast of Ireland the rain subsides and Wedgwood stops to photograph a shrine. Sunlight grazes against one of its statues; a woman, praying, dressed in yellow. Wedgwood’s shadow lingers in the foreground of the photograph as if to say- I too was here. In this way she paints herself into the story. Further down the road a pale patch of light reflects in O’Currain’s pub window where framed 1950’s film posters dust. Porcelain bric-a-brac, old cigarette tins and whisky bottles put their best foot forward in another pub window. Ireland, like many places has areas carved out for virtue and sin. Although here often the lines seem to blur. Church pews look like pub benches, confession booths like wooden pub snugs. Whisky, uisce beatha in Irish, translates as water of life. In Ireland, a pub is as much of a sanctuary as a church. Both are etched into the landscape, as permanent as the rain.
Wedgwood continues on through the streets. A little boy, no older than five stands against an old stone wall and looks into the camera with all the seriousness of what it is to be him in that moment in time. A row of rainbow painted houses stand tall under a sky filled with rain. School kids on their lunch break (short, tall, pale, tanned, freckled, shy-looking, bored-looking and reassuring unchanged despite the march of time) line up against the town walls to get their photo taken by the photographer lady. One boy asks if his spar deli baguette can be in the photograph.
Day becomes dusk and through the murky window of Foxy John’s Bar and Hardware Store the dim lamp light falls on a woman holding an Irish flute to her lips - a photograph that is filled with a sensitivity that is entirely Irish. Somewhere in the hills a wet tomb stone is bathed momentarily in heavenly light. Up on Slea Head blades of grass bend together in the wind. Sunlight rains down on an empty table in a roadside bar.
Wedgwood makes a habit of taking many of her photographs on the road. Impressionist strokes reappear again and again in her photographs making her work more comparable to a Turner painting than the polished type of photography she steers clear from. The elements spew against her windscreen and fields blur past in a kaleidoscope of green. Making it feel as if it is you, not her, in the passenger seat of a car travelling down the Wild Atlantic Way.
Life and death weave in and out of Wedgwood’s photographs. Ancestral voices echo in her work, whether it be a photograph of a remote hillside, a ship out at sea or a young boys face. With a delicacy that is Wedgwood’s own, she forces us to think about our existence and how the paths we tred have already been beaten into shape by those who came before us.
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Words Rebecca Wedgwood 2025