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Madrid · April 28, 2025
Gone
Dark
Light your way through the city
Ciara Lyden
Descending
Madrid ·
They said it was a cyber attack. I wondered has WW3 begun? Buildings shield us from the fading light, descending from above, a departing blue hue, trying to disconnect from us.
Without the electricity that runs through buildings they feel like shells. If the life has been stolen from them, will it be stolen from us as well?
En Rouge
Madrid ·
Red light trips over the edges of things, but softly. I see new texture with it, I see it in a playful way. I try to imagine it with normal light. The fading skies demand my attention, a different hue round every corner, a distant radio breaks the thought.
What the radio says I do not know.
Battery Bulbs
Madrid ·
The lights are on in this corner. The people here are home. They find themselves surrounded by warm light, and their wafting voices fill the cooling air.
I imagine the games they play together. I imagine the "girl dinners" and analogue evenings.
Last Light
Madrid ·
The tight feeling easing with every passing step in these streets. A wonder that advanced in the wander, unplanned, unplotted, searching for meaning. The old refreshed, our revitalised attention perceiving the world entirely anew.
I feared riots, I feared violence. The shops churned with bodies planning and prepping. The streets had a different vibe. They became a conduit of calm, a novelty museum for the curious people walking through.
Cobbled
Madrid ·
The shapes of the city have shifted. Their edges enunciated in an oppositional view; their stories narrated slowly by crawling cars; their corners and curves illuminated from below.
Cobbled streets staccato against a regimen of reinforced straight lines.
Night Light
Madrid ·
Technology promises that we can stay in touch with loved ones, by enabling our mobility beyond their reach. We sit alone. In search of a signal that all is well.
We have slid, somehow, into a world of technological intermediaries.
Crawler
Madrid ·
The future is here but we call it the present. Running on stealth and energy grids that power a prowl. Claiming the streets in silence. But their lights scream in the dark. Abrasive and blinding to all but those within.
Colour does not exist under these lights, I feel bleached by them.
Red Tails
Madrid ·
I do not understand the science of red light. I do not understand how it calms my eyes and soothes my soul but with it I can see farther. I wonder what life would be like for us and for the birds if our street lights were vermilion hue.
As they drive into the dying light, it feels like they have hitched warmth itself to their tails.
Blue Hue
Madrid ·
Sing my soul, what a blue! Behind us a Uniqlo has a still powered sign, branding their building and making a strange claim on the dark around us.
The shut up street demands attention in its reverberation, but the people who normally pass evenings here will never know.
Blaze
Madrid ·
A flare of light seemed overbearing. The screech of its whiteness offensive in the dark.
The eyes adjust before the mind.
Past Last
Madrid ·
Knives of light split the dark, creating canyons between the void. We were split from the past we knew, travelling into the unknowable. How long would it last? How had it come about?
Nothing to do but wander and wonder.
Illuminated
Madrid ·
We believe what we see. We cannot see ourselves in the dark, but we still search. What of our inner self becomes dominant in an effort to still perceive? The humming mind grows still and we begin to feel.
We reach inward when we are denied our outward view, no reflection no reverberation, an opportunity for reintroduction to self.
Collect Call
Madrid ·
Filtering through cables underground, impeded by switches manual and automatic, the power returns in silence, as lights spring in the distance. A woman navigating by her phone torch light takes a call. 3 tones of light are visible but the street light is still extinguished.
Who was the first person she spoke to when she was reconnected? Was it a return to the old, or were they both someone new?
Ciara Lyden
Artist Statement

Are we defined by how we are observed or what we observe? Is it more interesting to learn the blueprint of our soul by examining what we fail to witness?

What life lives beyond what we see, in versions of us we will never attain because self abandonment choices knocked us off our trajectories? What characters lurk behind our constructed selves? I will overturn the edges of all the things I meet in pursuit of this hidden self, in literal and abstract exploration, internal and external, collective and individual, curated and raw. The unseen and un-illuminated. The light and the shadow.

If we have a true prewritten purpose, there are people waiting for us there: friends, lovers and family. Are they lonely, waiting for us to step into ourselves? What detours do we take in pursuit of a place within society? How do we step off trajectory modern society demands we maintain?

Ciara Lyden is an Irish artist who works across photography, painting, and fiction in pursuit of these questions. Her practice holds a coherence of voice across different forms; the same obsession, differently expressed. Her inaugural series, 'Gone Dark', bears witness to the Iberian Blackout and launches on its first anniversary: April 28, 2026.

Ciara Lyden — full portfolio