Words by Tamsin Cunningham

Photographs by Eoin Carey

There are few places left in the world where humanity’s addiction to light does not hold sway. Wherever we go we bring the comfort-blanket of constant, ever-ready illumination. We live in a world in which streetlights, desklamps, computer screens and phones provide a perpetual daylight, always to hand. We have come to expect light as a right and as our capacity to provide it has grown, the value placed on darkness has diminished.

Darkness has become the shadowy corner that signals danger. It is the night terrors and the colour of death. In darkness we place the domain of shame, of taboo and of unspoken secrets, fears and desires.

But when we banish darkness we banish something essential of ourselves. One half of a cycle that is as much a part of our physiology and our psyche as the light. We need the vitamin D of sunlight but we need the nourishment of darkness too; one direction of the metronome swing of our circadian ryhthms, the oil in the gears of our parasympathetic nervous system, the fertile soil that allows us to grow. When we banish darkness we pathologise those elements of our psyches that are naturally nocturnal. We have made strangers of these parts of ourselves that are awoken by the dark rather than the light. In their estrangement we have become fearful of them. We turn the lights up brighter in the hopes they will disappear.

And yet there are still those few places where darkness still holds sway…..there to remind us of what we might find when we turn out the lights.