Victor Sloan (b.1945)
Holding the Rope, 1986
Silver gelatin print
58.5cm x 58.5cm
Courtesy of Board of Trustees of National Museums NI © Image Courtesy Victor Sloan
Victor Sloan studied painting at Belfast and Leeds Colleges of Art. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Photographic Society. His work is highly distinctive, created through altering photographs and negatives by painting, marking and scoring. Sloan usually produces works as a series. This work Holding the Rope is one from his Drumming series which was made in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, it reflects the tensions surrounding annual Orange Order marches. Sloan has commented that these images contain anger, frustration and violence: ‘It’s not only coming from me, but it could be coming from another community towards this community, or from this community that I photographed, to the other community’.