I have battled with anxiety for a large part of my life and one of the more severe symptoms known as derealisation / depersonalisation can be quite scary and make you feel hopeless or just plain crazy. It is a product of heightened anxiety over a very long period of time and this debilitating curse causes you to question your own reality even when you’re standing in it.
Using trichromatic photography as a way to visually represent derealisation, this project shows a reality in colour that isn’t quite right. Something is off and I find there is a sense of disturbing beauty in the results. Ghost forms of the world moving around me are recorded in red, green and blue. Every photograph presents itself as truth but has become inherently a lie due to its manipulation of time and space.
One day I stood in a shopping centre, unmoving. I could not recall in that moment how I came to be in this spot, a fog clouded my thoughts, people walked by me unaware of my turmoil, they were only a blur in my eyes, my heart raced as I began to ground myself and take a step forward.
My exhibition space in the DIVA Gallery in Dun Laoghaire last December became a photographic representation of how I felt that day, and so many other days.
I physically altered the photographs by layering, cutting and folding them in the space to create the feeling of unreality.
Finbar Flanagan 
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