Synkroniciti is stoked to welcome back Irish artist Robert Gillespie, first introduced to our community in the Belonging issue. In Expectations, he returns with three photographs from his arresting series Interloathing Index, a body of work that confronts the corrosive effects of internalized shame.
The images begin as familiar family snapshots: Robert and his siblings flanking their father; Robert alone in his school uniform, hands clasped in prayer; and finally, Robert with his mother and siblings, all caught mid‑laughter. But each photograph has been altered—Robert’s head replaced by a strange geometric object of his own making. The substitution is jarring, a visual metaphor for the ways alienation can distort identity from the inside out.
The last image is especially chilling. Everyone appears to be sharing a joke, yet the composition suggests that Robert himself is the punchline. The laughter becomes a kind of social weather: bright on the surface, but cold in its implications.
Interloathing Index is a daring and vulnerable series, one that exposes how shame can warp the sense of self and build an invisible prison around the psyche. Robert’s willingness to revisit these formative moments, and to intervene in them with such stark symbolism, invites viewers to consider their own inherited narratives and the quiet violence that sometimes shapes them.
View these uncanny images in Synkroniciti’s Expectations Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
I am Robert Gillespie. I grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. It was a brutalised, traumatised society and as an anxious, sensitive, geeky child I was brutalised by that society. I was afraid. All the time. The images included in this issue are from a series which I have not unveiled yet, titled Interloathing Index. It is about living with being the family disappointment after falling far short of expectations. Other’s expectations of me and those of myself.