James Cunningham is a multidisciplinary visual artist working across photography, audio, and painting. Drawing on a background in music and design, his practice engages with the visual language of the urban environment, distilling complex cityscapes into geometric forms, strong lines, and shifting fields of light and shadow.

The works in this exhibition were developed during Cunningham’s dual residency with The Guesthouse Project Cork and Saint Columb’s Hall Derry, where he began to explore maps, mapping, and systems of navigation. Approaching the map as both as a practical tool and a constructed illusion, Cunningham examines how it asserts authority while simultaneously revealing gaps, omissions, and embedded power structures. 

Through processes of fragmentation, layering, and reconfiguration, cartographic forms are translated  into large-scale figurative and abstract paintings that question the idea of neutrality and fixed perspective.

Navigation emerges here as both a physical and psychological act. Cunningham considers how individuals orient themselves within urban space—through streets, boundaries, and infrastructures—but  also through memory, experience, and social context. Routes become unstable, borders blur,  and the act of finding one’s way is recast as subjective and fluid. In this way, mapping is expanded  beyond representation into a broader reflection on movement,  perception, and belonging.

Across the works, recurring themes of place, isolation, and the shifting nature of community come  to the fore. Urban environments are presented as sites of both connection and anonymity, where  systems designed to organise and guide can also obscure, divide, or disorient. 
Cunningham’s work invites viewers to reconsider how spaces are structured and understood,  opening up new ways of seeing and navigating the world around them.

_____