Reminiscences

Portraits of the Traveller Community

by Mike Stone — 25.10.2023 – 25.11.2023

Make by Narture Studios present the first UK showing of Mike Stone’s Reminiscences Portraits of the Traveller Community.

Originally exhibited at the Cavan Arts Centre, County Cavan in 2017 and nominated for an IPB National Award this exhibition has subsequently toured the Irish Republic as a resource for equalities training.

A chance meeting in a Ballymahon bar between Mike and Ita Madden, a community nurse working with the Travellers, found a common interest in storytelling and a desire to record the stories of a community losing it’s cohesion to the modern world and the influence of drugs.

Three years of conversation and reassurance led to an invitation in the winter of 2015 for Mike to spend a couple of weeks living and travelling between Dublin, Navan and Cavan counties with three extended Traveller families. These are the images and stories that were recorded.

Mike Stone is a portrait and documentary photographer, having studied Photographic Art at Napier, Edinburgh Mike worked commercially in London for 30 years. Now working between his bases in Ayr and London Mike creates documentary work with communities and leads workshops in photography & storytelling.

Since 2022 Mike has been helping assist Narture to establish their photographic workshop programme and community dark room.