This is in the second last picture I made in this body of work, made in Newry, where I was staying en route to moving to Dublin from London. There were two dynamics to it - one, I wanted to make something really beautiful as well as, necessarily and paradoxically scary.

My mother once said to me "Seanie, why can't you do pictures of lovely flowers?"

So, eventually, and at the last moment, I did. I had always consciously wanted to make something of a corona / mandala of flowers and an apparition. On a visit to Glendalough in County Wicklow, a very beautiful valley with two lakes and a 6th century church and monastery, I found a postcard of whin / furze / gorse, of which there are five copies in the picture.
I photographed that wee soldier hiding under the stairwell of a block of flats in Newry, Easter Monday 1992, I think. He looks about seventeen, with or without the moustache.

It's been reproduced a lot, was the poster & press image for the 1999 'revealing images' show in London, and I actually miss the original quite a bit, though it's in good hands.


NFS. Courtesy of Steve Pyke.