see the pictures | visit irelantis | other links | make contact | home | news

This site is a gallery of photomontage works
made by Irish artist Seán Hillen between 1983 and '93.

"These are scalpel-and-glue photomontages. The older ones were made between 1983 and 93, were always based on my own documentary photographs made in northern Ireland, and were somehow related to and to an extent engaged in, the northern conflict.
I was born and grew up in Newry, a small but sometimes busy town just on the northern side of the Irish Border. Situated just at the head of the picturesque lough in the 'Gt. Pyramids' picture, it has experienced more than enough of the 'troubles'.

In 1993 I moved to Dublin. The second body of works, of 'Irelantis', were made between 1994 and '97, and were partly in response to my desire to get away from the 'war', and make more overtly healing works, as I used to say; pictures full of Love instead of Anxiety.
They are also different in using purely 'found' material, that is postcards, magazine pictures etc., and for that reason I usually refer to them as 'collages' rather than 'photomontages'.

What I do:

I like to work in different media. Apart from collage, I have made sculptural works in the past and am presently working on public sculpture, while at the Slade even made some video / performance work.
I take occasional commissions, which have included stage design and graphic design and illustration jobs. I made a little music video and did TV title graphics once.
I have also designed and built special props and effects for theatre.
I also do some visiting-lecturer work in art schools and elsewhere.

About the photomontage work:

In the case of the earlier work, I suppose I was very lucky, in that I had the motivation to make the montages, the material in the photographs I'd been taking, and that the medium lends itself perfectly to dialectic and political satire, which is what they are, to some extent. I originally was taking straight photographs for exhibition as a fine-art practice, and then began sort of 'embroidering' them with found bits and pieces, but in the end I was taking the photos specifically for use in montages.
It should be mentioned that all photography of the 'Security Forces' was and is technically illegal, and actively discouraged, I was a few times told where to go or what they'd do, and I usually tried to pretend I was press, or 'just' an innocent art student...

Though the older work was sort of censored from exhibitions in London on two occasions, in general though, the public there really liked it and 'got' it, it gained reasonable exposure if not the real attention I sort of hoped for.

It has been published in photographic magazines appearing on the covers of 'Creative Camera' and of the 'Royal Photographic Journal' for instance. The Imperial War Museum purchased several for their Permanent Collection and two are on semi-permanent exhibition in IWM North.

At the same time I had little interest in making or for that matter experiencing polemic or didactic art, which comes from a point of 'knowing better' than the viewer and telling one how it is. I really wanted, while conveying my ideas and impressions, to make the whole thing more open-handed, in the rough collage construction, in that you clearly see the way the thing is made, and perhaps and hopefully the argument(s) within.

I also believe they're to some extent 'thought experiments', and adventures, trying out my ideas on myself and you rather than hitting you over the head with them. They're definitely all meant to provoke thought, and usually to make you laugh.
There's also an element in all the work of wanting to make something that would stop you in your tracks, something you've never seen before, again that's something I enjoy myself.
And of course they're jokes about how reality is constructed, and about the possibility or likelihood that we don't agree on it, how multiple interpretations of reality don't necessarily negate each other.

Work that I personally like and admire would often be really serious comedy, from Jonathon Swift to Flann O'Brien to Kevin McAleer, the Dadaists and John Heartfield to the philosopher Robert Anton Wilson.

I do believe there's some truth in the idea that a good joke always contains some kernel of truth, although I remember some quote from Oscar Wilde along the lines of that whatever statement one can say that is the truth, then its opposite is probably also true.

There's a marvellous quote from Walter Benjamin that "convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsions of the soul"

I also like really good religious art which seems to carry conviction, from El Greco to Stanley Spencer to Pasolini to Patrick Pye.
I'm reminded also of Duchamp's remark that he made art primarily to amuse himself, and then trusted to posterity, and can identify with that.

Of course I was coming from a 'fine art' background, and certainly want(ed) them to be seen and taken in that context, if only because all I really wanted in the end was to do really good art, art that would 'give you something', (which is what I like as a punter myself,) and for people to see it, and that was where it took me.

In many of the early works there's often a dynamic of the business of the onlooker being somehow insulated by the frame, windows etc. but also implicated or otherwise inadvertantly involved.
This is connected to the device I became aware of later (though I must obviously been doing it instinctively), that I used a quite wide lens for nearly all the photos. It meant that I had to get very close to, if not right into whatever I was photographing, and also produced a perspective effect in the pictures which kind of sucks you into the space.
It seems to work no less when mixed with other perspectives, and there's a similar thing in that I often telescoped several high and vertiginous viewpoints (though or perhaps because I don't like heights myself) into a scene, producing what I've called 'roller-coaster' perspectives.

The Irelantis pictures began I think partly as a joke about whether Ireland was 'civilised', a sort of development from the 'noble / savage' jokes.

I was originally thinking of calling them 'Ancient Monuments In Ireland', and moving monuments from around the world into Irish landscapes. Then I hit on the Irelantis word, which while it has a bit of anxiety about it, also is a licence for delightful imaginings.
They're also I suppose about the place of any place in the World, and about the idea that Irishness was perhaps a state of mind- I also remember being in my kitchen in London and hearing on the radio the song called "If We Only Had Old Ireland Over Here", with a line that went "...if only Sydney Harbour opened onto Galway Bay.."

There's often some disaster or catastrophe in progress, but also an odd calmness while people go about their normal business or look on curiously.

They also, I hope, have a far more 'visionary' and hopeful aspect; a sense of immanence, of the magical and spritual aspects of reality leaking out into public spectacle.

I hope you enjoy seeing them. "

see the pictures | visit irelantis | other links | make contact | home | news