Patrick HOUGH

Profile

Born in Ireland in 1989. Lives and works in London. Graduated with a MA in Fine Art Photography from Royal College of Art in 2013.
Artist and filmmaker. Working across 16mm film, photography, sculpture and installation, their practice explores how histories of violence, belief and desire become embedded in landscapes, bodies and objects, often drawing on ecology, folklore, queer experience and the unstable boundary between fact and fiction.

Recent Exhibitions
2026 “UnWorlding,” Galway Arts Centre, Galway
2025 “BogSkin,” Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
2022 “CPH:DOX,” Film Festival, Copenhagen
2021 “The Black River of Herself,” Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
2021 “The Two Faces of Tomorrow,” National Sculpture Factory, Cork 

Awards 
2026 Arts Council of Ireland, Film Project Award
2019 Film London Flamin Productions Award
2016 Jerwood / FVU Award 2017: Neither One Thing or Another

About works

My work explores how landscapes, bodies and objects become charged by histories of violence, belief, desire and ecological change. Often working with 16mm film, photography, sculpture and installation, I use research, site-based filming and material experimentation to move between documentary, fiction and speculation. I am interested in places where official history feels unstable: ruins, archives, natural history collections, rural landscapes and marginal public spaces. Through these sites, my work considers how the past continues to shape the present, particularly in relation to queer experience, folklore, colonial histories and human relationships with the non-human world. Rather than presenting history as fixed, I approach it as something haunted, contested and still unfolding.