Breathing Land, Hazel Gaskin

In Breathing Land, Hazel Gaskin traces the lives of young people growing up in Belfast in the years following renewed unrest in 2021. Returning to the city over several years, Gaskin looks beyond the familiar narratives of conflict to consider how history, geography, and identity continue to shape everyday life.

Photographed between 2021 and 2025, the work follows teenagers as they move through spaces marked by peace walls, murals, and defensive architecture, while also forging their own rituals, friendships, and futures. Engaging with dance groups, boxing gyms, and youth communities, Gaskin focuses on adolescence as a moment of transition, when questions of belonging and possibility come sharply into view.

Rather than offering a fixed portrait of division, Breathing Land captures a city in motion. Traces of the past sit alongside signs of change, where inherited symbols are reinterpreted and quietly reshaped by a generation growing up after the conflict. The work presents Belfast not as a static place of division, but as a living,breathing environment, defined by resilience, complexity, and the ways young people learn to navigate it.

Published by New Dimension
120 pages
200 x 230 mm
ISBN 9781919181844