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John M Farrell, Circa Art Journal, Summer 1996
©CIRCA magazine 1996

The geography of a dream echoes off tangible, often memorable, landscapes and imbues them with hidden resonance. Familiar rooms open on strange corridors, mighty forests yield unknown clearings, rivers wind down to exotic tributaries all of which take us to places, and people, only known to us in dreams themselves.
Sean Hillen's superbly realized photo-montages (on view at the Newry & Mourne Arts Centre throughout March) have always recalled to me those mysterious places that are unknown in waking life, but whose vividness hangs over our conscious hours leaving a pale but persistent aura of longing. To be sure, Hillen's individually pillaged elements have, of themselves, little of that grandeur.

Superficial examination can lead to seeing little more (though little less as well) than the clever and often ironic juxtaposition of the merely incongruous. That conclusion must be considered a somewhat defensive one. Whether it arises from a cautionary reserve about just what those montages may reveal or a blunter, cruder, inability to comprehend the place of dream and myth in the self-aggrandizing ethos of Ireland herself seems hard to say.

But Ireland, like the Irelantis of Hillen's imagination, is a land of open-ended associations, a land whose people have so determinedly constructed their self esteem by the mantra-like insistence that Ireland, even with her physical and geographical limitations, embodies every urge to greatness ever known to man, that these constructed vistas and visions seem to carry undeniable truths
In our collective dreams we may recognize that there never were any pyramids at Carlingford, but that mere factuality will never stop us imagining that there should have been, or that there might have been such wonders as those Hillen invents. MacLuhan's dictum that 'the map is not the place', seems diminished by Hillen's contra-assertion that the place is not the place either. Every single work offers a cut out/pop-up view of a world hopelessly tangled, a world where time and meaning themselves are subject to one promiscuous interpenetration after another.

In the early works, London and Newry become fused to become LondoNewry, as clear a description of the contesting claims to the Northern province as has ever been uttered. The ubiquitous presence of the Virgin Mary at Newgrange, Newry, Tara, and even Temple Bar, likewise plays on this division, but it offers an even sharper image on which to hang and focus the continuity of the Virgin's unceasing presence in our midst. (Indeed, her presence seems so ubiquitous one if forced to ask 'is it we who worship her or the other way around?')

This may not be the theology of the Baltimore Catechism, but it strikes me as close to the theology of The X-Files; the pop repository of so much millennial angst. It is these uncanny frappes of ancient meaning and modern metaphysics (hyper-metaphysics? nano-metaphysics?) that ultimately make Hillen's work so arresting and so memorable.

His second most common conceit is the legendary Irish cosmonaut, Newry Gagarin. As I child I often visualized dreams beginning with my own bed rising, hovering' and then finally, easily, drifting out from my bedroom window. 'Newry' has been a frequent visitor to the enchanted (and doomed?) island of Irelantis. That silent vigil of his has always seemed the aptest metaphor for Hillen's own visual explorations. As a deity in this cosmology, Gagarin seems no more out of place than the Virgin Mother.

There is a Spanish saying that the inevitable has many doors. Hillen's monolithic presentations of an Ireland dotted with ruins to rival the Seven Wonders of Fore may seem jokey, but strangely linger on the eye, the weight of their presumptions lending them a gloss of the undeniable. Although the aesthetic of such strikingly haunting works as "The Pallestra of Sliabh Gullion" and "Dun Laoghaire from the Theatre of Delos, Sandycove" may owe much to the lurid colour excesses of kitsch classicist John Hinde, the sweetness and the care of their execution are too affectionate to be simply written off as a Joke.

"The Great Eruption viewed from The Liffey " and "Horse Racing near The Ruins Of Stephen's Green" offer an apocalyptic vision of our own time, transformed by Biblically scaled disasters (no doubt of our own folly). For Hillen Irelantis is, I think, the Ireland manufactured from equal parts of sacred presence and fit-up hucksterism. In the combination I think he finds an expression entirely worthy of our national dilemma. The making of Icons, like the making of Gods, can be a dangerous business. We can not be surprised that Irelantis seems a violent and unstable place. Perhaps this happens to any land that overspills its quota of meanings, or where meanings are too contested to be accommodated.

This was a fine and provocative show. Hillen is certainly one of the wryest and most humane respondents to the psychological clutter of modern, MTV Ireland and his is work whose evocations we should ponder, even while paying him the tribute of admiration for such technical and visual panache.

©CIRCA magazine 1996