Born 2005 In Belfast, Northern Ireland

Jude McKay is a creative documentary photographer, who, whilst achieving his undergrad at Ulster University, has discovered his voice in photographer that blends the style of documentary with the themes of mental health and the human condition as seen through the mind. His work primarily focuses on “Mental health and it’s relationship to the spaces we inhabit”, aiming to understand through the lens of photography, how to capture what the mind thinks or feels when it opens it’s eyes and looks around at the world it must inhabit.

During his undergrad studies, McKay explored this topic with his first ever project titled ‘Social Issue’, (2023) a series of 20 images that were a retrospective of his working struggle to integrate back into the world after the lifting of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in the United Kingdom. He would take this idea further into ‘Tether’ (2024), a project that told the story of the severing of a connection he and his father had whilst in lockdown. Able to spend more time together, McKay and his father would frequently climb Black Mountain in West Belfast, an activity that brought them closer together. But, as the restrictions lifted and schools and works opened up again, that tether became separated.

After concluding ‘Tether’ in 2024, McKay entered 2025 with a new outlook on his practice. This outlook soon sparked ‘Epidemic’, a series of self portraits that were described as “A dive into the mind of the isolated through an abstract lens”. Whilst very different from his documentary style practice, epidemic allowed McKay to delve deep into the darkest parts of the mind, pulling from it and using the isolation that plagues the 2020s to create a compelling and insightful piece of art. Coming out of Epidemic, McKay was able to take the experiences of that project to create the concluding project for his undergrad study, ‘The Old Unfamiliar’. A project that saw McKay’s search for the lost memories of his childhood that the stress of teenage and young adult life kept locked away until they were so faded that even the nostalgia of them became so foreign. It was this project that McKay was finally able to realist his practice, finding the perfect blend between documentation, exploration of the mind and mental health.

In addition to his solo works, McKay has also taken part in various group exhibitions across galleries in Belfast such as PS-Squared and Belfast Exposed whilst achieving his undergrad. Each focusing on themes such as mental health and growing up in a post Troubles Belfast