Mic Moroney peers into the bewildering, hilarious and destabilising collages of Newry-born artist Seán Hillen.


It's often hard to dampen a smile, peering into the daft, visionary wonderland of Seán Hillen's Irelantis. His humorous little paper collages of an imaginary Ireland have successfully burrowed into the public mind, popping up in art galleries and web pages, or bleeding out through Irish magazines and newspapers. Indeed, one little original graces the Taoiseach's (Irish Prime Minister's) office in Dublin - however it influences Bertie Ahern's judgement.

Some art students each year are writing their theses on Irelantis, and it has been published in book form as a joint venture between Hillen; theatre stage-manager Miriam Duffy; designer Clare O'Hagan; and leading Irish copywright lawyer Linda Scales - a handy ally for a montage artist, whose work inevitably plunders pre-existing images.

Hillen's images, with their zesty, full-saturation, fruit-pastille colour schemes, must be among the most upbeat in the world. But they have a strange, fantastical tinge: the souped-up Catholic kitsch colliding with a vivid, comic-book aesthetic; the reeling perpectives, swooping from sunny lakes into space - a crazed utopia which grows partly from the gently demented postcards of the late John Hinde, who immortalised a kitsch, high-colour, tourist-Ireland since the 1960s.

Seán Hillen's Irelantis is a bizarre hybrid - Ireland refracted through the legendary isle of Atlantis, an advanced, peaceful civilisation, as described by Plato. Yet the Gods eventually cast Atlantis into the sea - a disaster which scholars link with the Minoans, wiped out by tidal waves from a volcano four times the size of Krakatoa, around 1470 BC.
"In Irelantis however," says Hillen, "you never know whether we're heading for cataclysm or coming out of one."

Instead, Irelantis is a psychoactive tourist idyll, with leisurely citizens strolling past sunlit wonders: the Great Pyramids of Carlingford Lough, nestling insouciantly near the sea at the edge of the world; the faded columns of the Pallestra framing the Olympian majesty of Sliabh Gullion, under a gigantic earthrise; or the Colisseum of Cork, under a raging John Hinde sky.
Dublin's Four Courts shimmer near the Temple of Apollo and a breath-taking Glendalough. The Oracle shifts from Delphi to O'Connell St. Meanwhile, the Great Volcanic Eruption can be viewed from the ruins of Grafton Street, or the horse races near the ruins of Stephen's Green Shopping Centre.
But although chucklesome, Hillen's images run deeper than satire with their subterranean flow of ideas: the summery face of apocalyse in the globally warmed beach of Temple Bar; or the majestic brain-ball of verdure in space, Newry Gagarin over Dublin.

Even "An Unfortunate and Impossible Explosion of the Core of the Thorp Reactor, Viewed from the Taj Mahal of Carlingford, County Down" has a magical side: short-circuiting atomic energy and solstice-trapping Irish megalithic passage graves with other great civilisations - as though architecture could harness the cosmos.
Elsewhere, Hillen tilts at sacred cows in "Ecstatic Nuns Outside the Casino at Powerscourt, Co Wicklow."

The John Hinde company couldn't quite get their heads around it at first, but after much wheedling and cajoling, director Niall Howard has allowed Hillen "unique permission" to adapt the unforgettable Hinde imagery.
Hillen himself, a little Newryman who, with his pixique stature, would not look out of place in one of his own mutant landscapes, is a relentless punster, with an off-beat, arcane list of influences: Eric von Daniken; radical American writers like conspiracy prankster Robert Anton Wilson; or Italian Renaissance philospher Giambattista Vico, whose concept of circular history described recurring cycles of barbarism, heroism and reason. Hillen: "It always reminds me of the last scene in Planet of the Apes, with the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand."

In an Age of Photoshop, Hillen still fashions his tiny collages with a binocular microscope, manipulating a magnified world of paper and card with a surgeon's scalpel.
"Most of the Irelantis pictures grew organically. I laughed out loud while I was making them, on my own in the middle of the night - partly from sheer visual delight. I suppose they're propaganda for a fairly strange set of notions.

"There's something about tolerating a fantasy and not needing to know whether it's true or not. Seamus Heaney has a line about 'waiting until I was nearly 50 to credit marvels' - that idea of letting something extraordinary be, not having to stamp on it. It reminds me of the French chemist, Lavoisier, trying to convince the Academy of Scientists that meteorites existed. He even showed them meteorites, but they didn't believe their own eyes because stones COULDN'T (italics) fall from the sky. But in Alice in Wonderland, I love that line where a character talks of trying to imagine six impossible things before breakfast... I find that intoxicating..."

"With Irelantis, I was trying to indulge a whole fantasy magical element, with a big play on immanence, the spiritual aspect of existence leaking into visibility, the godlike aspect in everything. It's a golden country. Although there are anxieties, the anxieties are manifest and they don't matter in a certain way, you can walk past the volcanos..."

When Hillen arrived in Dublin in 1992, he was a total stranger to the city, having spent many years in London. He was born in Newry an hour after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, landed in a Russian field in April 1961. The second youngest of five, Hillen grew up in the Meadow estate: "right bedside Derrybeg - two quite republican estates, which often were barricaded off from the British Army."

In The Great Pyramids of Carlingford Lough, he deliberately placed the pyramids on the Irish border - and later discovered Giza was Arabic for border. "I remember being 10 or 11 and trying to imagine living somewhere where there wasn't a constant war, and finding it unimaginable, but knowing that it must exist. As kids, we went to Galway and Skerries - it was an incredible relief. It was bemusing, because you couldn't quite imagine what people would be thinking about, if they weren't worrying about soldiers down the street or who was going to get shot next..."

He himself was arrested by soldiers for stone-throwing when he was 15. "It taught me not to stick my head in the lion's mouth, that there were smarter things to do..." Art was the only subject he sat in his A-levels, but it got him into Belfast City College in Jordanstown, where he began documentary photography of Belfast people, streets, Orange marches, etc.
From there he went to the London College of Printing for a media degree course. "I was still going back and forth between Newry and London, but I had more of a context now, and in my first year there, I did my first photomontages."

Over subsequent years, he produced a large body of work, in which his own black-and-white photographs - snatching security installations, RUC landrovers and British soldiers on the streets with a pocket camera - were collaged into impossible haloes of gorse and Virgin Maries; the TV hard-men detectives, The Professionals; or a hodge-podge of sunlit London postcard scenery.
Collectively titled LondoNewry, it remains an exhilarating, powerful body of work which predictably met with censorship - but incredibly, three pieces were acquired by the Permanent Collection of the Imperial War Museum.

"They were live documents then, about a voice and an experience which was really not heard at all. However, it made some people nervous, and one critic even described some of the work as "a hymn to republicanism", which at the time was enough to get me killed.
"I was representing the fantasy, postcard London, alongside the cruel reality that the comfort, that power to write this image of oneself - indeed all cultures - are built on savagery of some kind, and that the whole thing is circular. I wasn't saying this was fact or reality. I was just asking 'how would you like this situation on your street? - trying to project the viewer into my experience of confronting a number of conflicting realities at once."

LondoNewry, is of course a pun on the disputed placename of (London)derry. Sean: "It's a Swiftian thing, to take a bad joke which is reality, and push it beyond the bounds of believability, pointing out how arbitrary one's handle on reality is. There are all these gaps and slips. I suppose it comes from being aware of living in two places at once. Newry was Ireland but with this veneer of Britishness. I grew up watching Blue Peter, and the south of Ireland was foreign. I grew up thinking that British cars were the best, that Britain's professional army was the best at killing people, and you only gradually became aware of the ambivalence of that and even the duality of every named form of existence.

"I was aware that imagination was the catalyst, that it was up to you how to read where you were in the world - even while there were others in the same town and street who had profoundly different ideas about what was going on - and who was in charge."

In the late 1980s, Hillen attended the prestigious Slade School of Art, and he even invented a machine to print his own photomontages large. In 1991, it won second prize in the biggest British invention award, the Design Council's Year of Invention Competition, which was presented by the then Energy Minister at a lavish ceremony in The Savoy Hotel.

"For a while I had my girlfriend telling me to give up art and stick to invention, and the bank manager telling me to give up invention and stick to art, or it may have been the other way round... anyway, I felt like Sisyphus, but I woke every morning with two huge boulders to push endlessly uphill..."

But shortly after Hillen arrived in Dublin, despite critical acclaim in certain quarters, he realised there was a resistance to his LondoNewry work much stronger than in London. "Some people just didn't want to know about it. It was like a glass wall, and it came out of the old anxiety about and hostility to republicanism." As a result, and partly for his own sanity, Hillen changed direction - into Irelantis.

"That shift from the Troublesy artist to the visionary artist was a very conscious act of self-transformation - even in my own psychology. I wanted to make happy, optimistic work, because I was very aware of having made this poison necklace for myself, and I wanted to let the imagination fly into this free place where war wasn't on the agenda. So I entered the dreamland. It's like Orwell's 1984, the dream of the golden country in the guy's head, a rural idyll very much of his own imagination, whereas he's in this grimy city. It's a Garden of Eden."

"I always had an amateur interest in physics, and asked impossible questions in school and was often disappointed bythe answers. But I was always fascinated by the classic, profound terrors of infinity, discovering that it really is a mysterious universe and that physics has big paradoxes and holes, and where it ends, you look into the abyss, a wonderful and a frightening thing..."

Although wildly different, both Hillen's LondonNewry and Irelantis bodies of work betray a remarkably consistent vision, but even the new popularity of Irelantis in both Dublin and the UK caused its own difficulties. Some business sharks in Dublin actually registered the web domain name, www.Irelantis.com - which, happily, Seán has now wrested back.

One idea was to brand Irelantis, with spin-off ideas like the Irelantisation of Dublin views - with strategically placed binocular viewfinders on the Liffey quays, superimposing other trompe d'leoil architectures on the scene. "The humour is critical, Irelantis would be dead in the water without it. It's the mechanism for the revelation, at the same time I'd like to think it disarms you slightly. Armour-piercing art, I used to call it - to pierce emotional armour."

His new project is typically eccentric - "what I call the 'new bonkers work' which is about speculative archaeology for want of a better phrase. That whole archaeo-astronomy area of 'lost technology' is heavily mined these days, looking at ancient artefacts and gold treasures which look like they have technological content, whatever the hell it is. Some Bronze Age jewelry looks like the earliest apparatus used by Heinrich Hertz for radio waves...

"But you're into New Agey territory. Some scientists agree there's some truth in dowsing, leylines and stuff - but whatever about scientists, it's only just about ok for a artist to talk about it, because we have a license to be a bit bonkers. But generally, in polite company, I wouldn't be inclined to discuss it at all!"

Recently, (2001) Seán has produced a very peculiar video/computer- animation for the UK rock band, Super Furry Animals, and their unprecedented album/DVD launch.
He has also veered back into very Irelantissy territory with a series of paper/Photoshop collages for the Bank of Ireland's new ATM advertising campaign. This involves collaging ATM machines onto the Blarney stone, as depicted in a high-coloured John Hinde postcard, with a young woman being lowered in on her back to kiss the stone.
Others involve placing PASS machines in the upright stone of a dolmen, or the side of a round tower.

Hillen's level of satire is highly sacriligious, yet once you have caught your breath after doubling over, laughing at it, you kind of scratch your head and think - yeah , this guy has a serious point...


© Mic Moroney 2001-2004.

  Find more about Seán's work and about IRELANTIS in the Irelantis press and news sections
and at seanhillen.com's about and news.