Media Resources
As an immigrant, whose life has been shaped by movement, I am intrigued by the connections we establish with places and how identity, decay and sensuality intermingle to offer a glimpse of our evolving sense of self.
ROBYN DALY BIO
Robyn Daly is an Irish-South African performative photographer living and working in Ireland. She moved to Ireland from Cape Town in 2020 and settled in Ballymahon in a semi-derelict 1920s house that has provided the canvas for many of her works.
A former photojournalist and editor turned commercial product photographer and stop-motion animator, she switched to fine-art photography in 2025.
She holds a Masters Degree from Rhodes University with a specialisation in women’s studies and 19th century fairy stories, influences that have carried through to her photographic work in Ireland with a growing interest in Irish folklore. Her work centres on women’s lived experience, using long-exposure photography to explore and express what it means to inhabit a female body.
A career highlight was the acquisition in 2026 of one of her works by Christian Levett. The Chemistry Of Me now resides in the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins, in Provence, alongside the works by some of her photography heroes: Lee Miller, Dora Maar and Nan Goldin.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an immigrant whose life has been shaped by movement, I am intrigued by the connections we establish with places and how identity, decay and sensuality intermingle. Photographing in the domestic spaces of derelict and abandoned houses in Ireland, I use myself as subject to explore the nuances that arise when body, place and time are brought into relation.
Movement is a hallmark of my visual language, explored through performance and long exposures that imbue the images with a painterly quality. Where women have been traditionally positioned as objects of observation, my work considers the female form as active and self-determining; a site of agency and possibility.
This opens up new ways of seeing. The body becomes unstable in beautiful ways, exceeding its apparent boundaries as it merges with and emerges from its surroundings: we are not simply in the world; we exist through our relations with it. Underpinning this work is a conviction that the fixed image of ourselves is too narrow: life is stranger and more generous than the versions we habitually present to the world. Through the interplay of light, time and movement, the photographs become expressions of lived experience.