Madrid · April 28, 2025
Gone
Dark
An interactive online exhibition experience of the inaugural work of Ciara Lyden exploring the Iberian peninsula black out. As the light fades, use your mouse to navigate your way through the image and find your focus in the dark.
Ciara Lyden
Descending
A vertical view looking up between two narrow Madrid apartment buildings at dusk. A pale blue sky shows at the top. A white drainpipe and a small antenna are silhouetted against the sky. The walls of the buildings are dark. Windows are visible and not one window has a light on.
Madrid ·
They said it was a cyber attack. I wondered has WW3 begun? Buildings shield us from the fading light. It is somehow both descending from above, and 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
A Madrid building facade at night. A balcony in the upper centre is strung with paper lanterns and small lights. Red light from a nearby ground-level source falls across the stucco wall and the balcony railings. The sky behind is deep blue at the edge of night.
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
Looking up between Madrid apartment blocks at dusk. Eight windows in the buildings are lit warm orange from candles inside. Another window on the left is faintly lit. String lights hang from a balcony at the top left. The sky is pale fading blue.
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
A narrow Madrid street at sunset. Two figures walk away from the camera down the centre of the street, backlit by a streetlamp on the right that glows warm yellow. The sky at the end of the street fades from orange to blue. None of the windows in the surrounding buildings are illuminated; the domestic and street light appear to be sourced from different electrical reserves.
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
A single-carriage cobblestone street at night. A single set of car headlights in the distance casts a long beam of light along the cobblestones. Trees and bollards line the right side. Everything outside the headlight beam is in deep shadow. The headlights catch the reflective metal of the fencing on the left at low level, making patterns between the vertical lines of the fence and the bricks in the ground.
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
A person sits alone on a low concrete bench at night, lit only by the screen of their phone. Behind them, a tall modern office block is lit in cold blue tones. A metal fence runs between the bench and the building.
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
A dark alley at night. A single car at the far end has its headlights on, casting a narrow beam of light along the cobblestones toward the camera. The walls and surroundings are entirely black.
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
A narrow Madrid street at night. The red brake lights of a car in the centre of the street wash the entire scene in red. Parked cars line the left side. The sky above is deep blue.
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 chase the departing sky's dying light, it feels like they have hitched warmth itself to their tails.
Blue Hue
A Madrid shopping street at night, viewed from one end. The storefronts are dark and unlit. The sky between the buildings is a deep saturated blue.
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
A narrow Madrid street at night. Two bright white headlights at the far end illuminate silhouetted figures around them. The buildings on either side are completely dark.
Madrid ·
A flare of light seemed overbearing. The screech of its whiteness offensive in the dark.
My eyes so quick to adjust to a normal my mind still struggles to know.
Past Last
Looking down a narrow Madrid street at twilight. The buildings on both sides are pure silhouette. A small wedge of orange and pale yellow sunset shows at the end of the street. A power line crosses the sky.
Madrid ·
Knives of light slice the dark, creating canyons in the void. We are split from the past we knew. Travelling through an inversion of expectation. This is how my ancestors saw the world, almost. How long would it last? How had it come about?
Nothing to do but wander and wonder.
Illuminated
The interior of a dim Madrid building hallway. Light enters through a row of small skylights at the top of the frame and through a tall window at the far end. Two figures are silhouetted in the middle distance. The floor is patterned tile.
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
A doorway on a Madrid street at night. The door is heavily covered in graffiti, visible in the orb of light cast from a figure standing in front of it. They are on their phone with the torch illuminated, lighting them from behind; they are otherwise mostly in shadow, a silhouette. Scaffolding frames the left side. A faint blue-green light spills from a window above. A warm orange light glows from a window on the right. The image was taken after the city had begun restoring energy but before the street lights came back on.
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? Did relief flood in at the reconnection? Did it ebb away the experience? Was it a hiatus in normal or a redirection to something 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? There are versions of us we will never attain. Our curiosity or lack of it, our self acceptance and self exploration may knock us off our trajectory or back onto it. So much of society is structured so we will understand what about us is profitable. That sliver of self is bloomed and the rest of us is diminished and kept out of view. What characters lurk behind our constructed selves? Collectors of my work will observe me overturn the edges of all the things I meet in pursuit of this hidden self. In both my writing and visual exploration my focus will be on illuminating the unseen. The internal and external, collective and individual, curated and raw. The light and the shadow. The unseen and un-illuminated. My signature will be the pursuit of these themes. My body of work will seek to throw light on these things.

If we have a true pre-written purpose, there are people waiting for us along the way to our intended destination, parched for the inspiration they would derive from the work that we avoid. Our individual creativity, our lens on the world is then an obligation to our individual selves and the collective whole.

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.

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