Tadhg Mae Projects are proud to present an exhibition of the work of Richard Butchins. As a photographer, he is known for his interpretions and translations that rework the symbolism of Vanitas paintings into modern symbolic representations of exclusion and otherness.

This exhibition zooms in sharply on the details in those photographs: the broken dolls, a blurred rabbit mask, dying flowers.

Richard says, “These small images are details from larger tableaux and shown without their parents. They’re not excerpts, so much as proof that every picture hides many other pictures. I build in layers, so the fragments stand on their own: composition, gesture, light, all tightened to a sharper point.

I’m an artist, award-winning filmmaker and writer who travels the hard shoulder of art. No training, just graft. Disabled and autistic, I work across photography, installation and broadcast, testing how images frame power, beauty and the body. 

My documentaries for BBC, Channel 4 and ITV earned the British Journalism Award and the Scope Disability Journalist of the Year in 2022. In galleries, I construct baroque, in-camera scenes. No digital composites; objects and light do the heavy lifting. I choose difficult truths over polite narratives and write like someone who has run out of patience with modernity. I live by the sea and do not have a cat.”