FRANKIE MCALLISTER
Frankie McAllister is an Irish photographer, based in London. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, from the UK to the USA, Greece, France, and the Netherlands...
EXHIBITION
SUBJECTIVE VIEW
20th July 2026 - 27th November 2026
Subjective View is a curation of selected works from five distinct landscape series by the artist Frankie McAllister. The collection, taken at different times and in different places, is threaded together by McAllister’s visceral, subjective response to landscape.
The experience of landscape is never a neutral or objective thing, and a photograph cannot really be a completely accurate record, it is always a reflection of what the photographer receives and perceives in a given moment. My intention therefore is not to record how a landscape is, but to capture how it feels.
In this way McAllister weaves together both the light and the dark before her and within; permitting her imagery to absorb not just the visual field but deeper memories and emotions until it becomes a rich textural interplay of places and remembrances.
THE BIRDSONG SOUNDS THE SAME
Earth, rock, water, soil. Fundamentals that are real and corporeal, unchanged by a superficial stamp superimposed to delineate this or that ownership. Artificial changes, this colour or that type, this country or that – the material reality doesn’t change. The air still flows across borders, the wind whips around fences and through the trees, and the birdsong sounds the same.
BIOGRAPHY
Frankie is a Northern Irish photographer based in London. Her practice sits between representational and abstract photography, blurring artistic lines to consider objective visual reality and subjective reaction; and enacting a dialogue between imagination, memory and sensation. She is particularly drawn to landscapes altered by human presence and imprinted with geopolitics. She recently published ‘Dividing Lines’, a post-Brexit collection capturing the landscapes of northwestern Ireland to metaphorise the absurdity of borders and artificial divisions in material geography.
Frankie is also a founding member of FIKA book & zine, a new photography book collective, which published their first collaborative trilogy in 2024. She has exhibited internationally (UK, USA, Greece, France, and the Netherlands) and received commendations from numerous photography competitions.
To Frankie, what it's all about is a sense of 'outsiderness' - the outsider looking in. It permeates her work regardless of subject. It’s not judgmental - there is connection and empathy but it comes from a place (unchosen) outside, observing, intuiting, noticing and, often literally, sympathizing. She put it down to a peripatetic childhood, arriving too often in new places, the new girl in school. You assess your new circumstances, the groupings and connections between your new friends and you learn very quickly to adapt, like a chameleon, in order to fit in.
