About Abletenet

Abletenet began with a simple love of light — how it presents itself, and how swiftly it can transform a scene, shifting the ordinary into the extraordinary in a heartbeat.

Sometimes in reverse. 

From its conception, photography became a way of stopping for me.

Of noticing. Of not wanting to miss what was already here. With this came the understanding that I had to make myself available — present and therefore still enough to receive what was being offered. 

The images that emerged were not merely declarations of I was there, but I am. 

They were acts of witnessing — the recognizable presence behind the lens. 

In the beginning, after many fits and starts, highlights and low points along my mental-health journey, there was a prayer: 

“Lord, give me something I can become good at — something I will enjoy doing.” 

Photography drew me out of my head and back into what was immediate — the intimacy of the present moment. 

Alongside this grew a love of words, and the music that often carried them — the theme songs of life that had shaped and inspired me. These spoke as clearly as my wordless images, and so they found their way into the work. 

Scripture points toward the eternal — the unchanging. 

Nature, by contrast, speaks of change — the corporeal — revealing itself yet never allowing capture. It belongs to no one. 

You cannot pin spiritual truth to the sky. 

You cannot fix meaning to a landscape. 

The intention behind these works is not to impose, but to point — to turn the mind back toward its source: consciousness itself, and perhaps beyond that, to God.

Nicholas McDaid