Two Artists, One Show, No Tennis
The Idea
I’ve been working alongside Belfast based artist Neil Gillespie for a few years, capturing his process etc. but halfway through 2025 he came to me with an idea. He mentioned that he was drawn to a photograph I took of a tennis court in Amsterdam and that he’d like to maybe collaborate and combine my photography with his painting.
After a bit of discussion I headed off with my LUMIX S9 and took a few example photographs of local tennis courts to see if I could capture anything interesting. Neil played around with the example images and what we liked were the lines, the shapes, the textures - but not so much the colour. I decided that I would head out again, this time to a lot more tennis courts around Northern Ireland, with my film camera and a few rolls of black & white 35mm film in the form of Ilford HP5 Plus 400.
Photography Prints
I think I shot at something like 14 tennis courts that warm day in June 2025. Once I had taken the rolls out of my Yashica Electro 35 GTN, I posted them off to my lab (Gulabi in Glasgow) for development and after that it was scanning and printing. Here are some of the final scans…
Neil Sees The Photographs
I brought the final printed images to Neil who flicked through them for the first time. Seeing the images physically printed together, he instantly had the idea of pairing the photographs, creating a diptych of photographs per final piece.
He had already started prepping the wooden boards with texture using his signature alternative materials found in the DIY shop, and now he had the images with lines, shapes and shadows to play off. Here he is looking at the photographs for the very first time (yes we were in a car park)…
Progress on the Pieces
After a few months of play (and a lot of voice notes and photographs shared back and forth over WhatsApp) Neil had made progress on the first few pieces. I headed to his studio in Belfast to see his progress in-person for the first time…
Neil had decided to keep the photographs whole, offset them from the centre and pair them together. He took inspiration from the photographs for shades, shapes and lines. The result was a modular painting, almost like brick work, with little vignettes of texture and tone sitting beside one another.
As the weeks passed and the deadline for the show crept up, the final pieces started to take shape. The result was five bigger and two smaller pieces of art. Something we had discussed along the way was having me photograph the five bigger pieces so we could produce prints to sell on opening night.
Instead of photographing the whole final piece, we thought it would be a cool idea to use the camera to choose only a few small areas of the pieces for the prints - almost creating a whole new piece of art in itself.
We decided to send the five bigger pieces off to be framed by Belfast framers Framewerk and Neil decided to frame the other two himself…
Opening Night of ‘RALLIES’
The 16th of November saw the opening of ‘RALLIES’ in Belfast. Check out some images from the opening night of ‘RALLIES’ below captured by Ruth Kelly…
All in all Neil and I are super happy with how this project turned out. What started off as inspiration from the lines and shapes of a tennis court, became so much more. The whole process felt like a tennis match… or more accurately that we were rallying the project back and forth. I think nearly every day for a whole 3/4months we were chatting and serving each other new ideas and fresh perspectives. It was tiring but really rewarding.
It definitely wasn’t easy to combine paint and photography - especially as the project came from two different artists with two different thoughts, opinions and ideas. The final pieces however landed in a place we are both proud of and I think the work is really interesting. Each piece is totally unique and different from the last.
The ‘theme’ was tennis but so many ideas were tossed back and forth between Neil and I for these that I think lots of themes made there way in. Nature, decay, place, landscape, conflict, childhood, nostalgia loneliness, hope. For us anyway all of these things exist in these pieces. There’s a real magic about how your eye is drawn around the work and there are endless little details to look at.
Thanks to Neil for wanting to rally with me on this! It was a real pleasure and maybe we’ll be able to work on something similar in the future…
Prints are still available from this project, so if you’re interested get in touch with either Neil or I and we can sort something out. You can find Neil on Instagram here -
https://www.instagram.com/neilgillespieart/
The Making of ‘RALLIES’
Obviously me being me I had to document the process of this project. So, if you want to watch some behind the scenes from the making of ‘RALLIES’ - make sure to give the video below a watch.
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