Pink Roses

Bush's photographic investigation of Bonnettstown Hall, a deteriorating early eighteenth-century manor house near Kilkenny, Ireland, focused on how, in the artist's words, the house itself "disclosed varying degrees of intimacy and privacy." This exquisitely crafted color photograph of the physical remnants of the European aristocratic tradition provides a rare glimpse into the lives of generations of inhabitants. Bush came to Bonnettstown Hall by accident. Hitchhiking, he was picked up by one of the house's four elderly residents, its owner, a retired Royal Navy Commander. Once a visitor, the artist found it hard to leave and photographed the Georgian limestone house and its contents over a four year period from 1979 to 1982. What makes a house a home is more than an array of well-worn books or ancestral portraits in dusty frames. Sometimes it is a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers, a remembered melody, or the tilt of a reading lamp.