Danny Treacy

As The Photographers’ Gallery prepares to move intoprestigious new premises, its curator senses a new-foundnational confidence in the medium, says Annie Dare

Technically, Danny Treacy’s life-size photographic series ‘Them’ is selfportraiture, since it is in fact the 33-yearold Mancunian photographer himself who stands stitched inside these fabric hobgoblins, AirTex industrial zombies and felt-trimmed, fur-lined mythical beasts. But Treacy calls it “the antithesis of selfportraiture”, as during the process of collecting, stitching and donning costume, he feels his own self gradually ebb into a new skin, gender, race, or type.

His figures – 18 to date and he’s only just begun – loom anonymously from their black studio background, frozen stiffly in posture, face always obscured. The glare of flashbulb on synthetic fabric feels like a muffled scream: a certain soiling around a crotch provokes quiet horror. Yet, Treacy says, “it is not my intention to produce menacing imagery; I stand in a generic pose, a simple frontal view which gives the viewer the best and most impartial view of the surface information and textures of the clothing. This pose can come across as confrontational. Maybe it’s this, combined with the fact that the viewer can’t see any facial features, that produces feelings of insecurity and menace. But the images are seductive too, and I like this duality of seduction and repulsion; it mirrors my experience of the drive to create the pieces.”

This drive takes Treacy to areas he calls “fertile grounds”, places like car parks, woodland and wasteland, areas of hidden human activity, where he scavenges for clothing that others have left in their wake. This makes his photographs feel to him like “documents of my extreme closeness to strangers, by proxy, through their clothing.” He sees the clothing as trophies, souvenirs of his adventures in collecting, and looks on the making of his macabre outfits as something akin to a violation of the clothing’s history. But, he continues, “in many cases, it is as if the figure that I create had always existed, sometimes appearing like a medieval suit of armour, at other times becoming some kind of primitive man.” His fabric figures feel “like an extended family.”

Grafik enthuses: “Treacy’s ‘Them’ takes the concept of the self-portrait and adds a multitude of layers over and under it. The artist is present but unrecognisable, appearing almost shamanistic with his masked or absent face hidden behind clothes which possess the trace of others on them, where the robes he wears offer symbolism we don’t understand.”

Treacy is artist-in-residence at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, between March and May. He will also be part of a group show, called ‘New Photography from Britain’, which will exhibit in April in
Modena, Italy, and he will be exhibiting a solo show at The Photographers’ Gallery starting 17 July.