Photography Exhibition - 'Acts of Becoming' by Rosy Martin

Martin’s work challenges what it means to become visible on one’s own terms. Across more than four decades, she has used photography, performance, self-portraiture, still life and re-enactment in phototherapy. It questions how identities are formed, represented and remembered. Her photographs do not present identity as settled or singular, instead, they reveal the self as layered, contradictory and continually changing.

At the core of Martin’s practice is a belief that dominant female representation needs to be challenged and remade. By entering the image herself, she opens its meaning and creates new ways of seeing and being.

Martin’s work has particular resonance at Belfast Exposed. The organisation began from an understanding that photography participates in public life: images can reinforce dominant accounts, but they can also allow people to represent their own experience. Martin’s practice carries that question into the intimate territories of the body, the family and the home. Her photographs connect private distress to the social structures that shape it, including patriarchy, heteronormativity, class, medical authority and ageism.

Act of Becoming presents Martin’s practice as an evolving body of work rather than a retrospective search for a single authentic self. Her images hold contradiction without resolving it.