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.