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Transcript from "The Sean Rafferty Show"
BBC Radio N. Ireland. 18th March 1996.
© BBC N.Ireland 1996

Sean Rafferty: Living in two places at one time.. I think is the ethos or part of it", that's what Seamus Heaney said, and we all know the feeling of that, I think, with the different pulls there are on this island; the Troubles meet fantasy, and inspiration can certainly strike in a quirky way. Those are the works of Sean Hillen- as I said, Seamus Heaney likes his art work very much, it's disturbing, funny, irreverent, and it is very good indeed. And it's really taking sort of collages of strange images, and putting the most unlikely together in a very irreverent way, I think the suffragettes probably would have been proud of him, Sean Hillen, good morning.

Sean Hillen: Good moming.

S.R. Thank you for joining us, you've come from Newry via the Slade in London, and back now to Dublin, how would you describe it? A montage doesn't really give the idea- a collage of seemingly contradictory images?

S.H. They're kind of fantasy pictures made with collage- and you know, collage has a very long history, it's always been used to unite opposing things, to make fantastic, impossible pictures. It's always had an element of play to it, and a bit of radicalism..

S.R. So you're obviously making a point, I mean the fantasy of the Pyramids on Carlingford Lough, for instance?..

S.H. I suppose, well it lends itself to making points, but one doesn't want to make an art out of mak ing points, at the same time, so I suppose that's a kind of a difficult thing.. well it's playful, you know, it's jokes, and it's about that funny relation between jokes and truth, you know, that there's always a little bit of truth at the core of a good joke..

S.R. And there should be something disturbing, which there is a little bit in your work.. if you see LondoNewry, for instance, and these strange buildings, and Sr. Faustina making a visit to Newry, some people might think you were being a little bit too irreverent?

S.H. Well that old stuff,- you know, I grew up in Newry in the middle of a shooting match, and that was a transforming, profound experience, and I suppose one never exorcises that, and you have to approach it in some way, and that was a compulsive activity making those pictures, I've just stopped doing those in the past couple of years, which is a great thing for me..

S.R. You've worked it out now..

S.H. I think so, well I kind of exhausted it, and it wasn't good for me, and I'd done everything I could, I spent 11 years making those 'political' montages, so..

S.R. I think if you are artistic, and goodness knows we're all influenced by where we're brought up, and everybody here's influenced terribly by the Troubles, I mean for someone who's actually making an expression of things that are in your head, it's bound to come out, isn't it?

S.H. Yes, .. I suppose I'd like to think there was an element of not just discourse, but of intercourse, that I was putting out something in the world that was open, to different interpretations, and that I wasn't beating people over the head with my ideas, and I like the idea that the content to them is very overt, and the tricks are overt, even in the construction of the things you can see the edges and all that, and so we both know that we're involved in a Game,.. and one of the things behind them, my feeling was, that I was talking about my experience and my perceptions, but that I was aware that this wasn't the only interpretation of reality, and it's also about that whole business, I suppose, that reality is constructed all the time, you know, - we're all living in different varieties of the same place..

S.R. I see that fantasy, as you say, isn't that far from some people's idea of reality; for instance, there's a wonderful one of 'The Queen of Heaven appearing at Newgrange', which is an ancient Neolithic site in Co. Louth, and I gather you had some quite strange reactions to that..

S.H. Yes, I love that picture- She's the Goddess, you see, and I'm kind of post-Catholic, I suppose..

S.R. (laughs) Is there such a thing?

S.H. Well, there might be, and - I love figuring her as the Goddess because Ireland had Goddess worship, and Newgrange probably was a kind of Cathedral to the Goddess of its time, the Triple Goddess business, and She looks like She really is appearing there, She's floating in that incredible light that comes down the passage in Newgrange. You know, I sell prints of these things, because I love them to go out, and it makes a little money, and I have good stories about that: Someone gave it to their nine-year-old nephew, and he says his prayers to it every night, and someone else gave it to their granny, and she wanted to know did She really appear there?.. and I used to sell those things, like the 'Pyramids on Carlingford Lough' to tourists, and they used to ask; "Gee, are those things really there?" (laughter) I love that business, because they look so real, and that's always been the power of photomontage, that it looks real, and when you look at it you see a 'thing' first, and then the idea is kind of sneaking in underneath...

S.R. Well you heard about- you know, nothing happens by chance, Sean, this is all so cosmic, the day your work arrived in here, I'd been talking about Carlingford Lough because I'd been there at the weekend, I was remembering how beautiful it is, how historic and how beautiful it all is, at lunch with Ann Kearns, who's an extraordinary clairvoyant who was on the programme a few weeks ago, she is a very keen believer in reincarnation, and she said "I think we've met before, somewhere, I think it might have been in Ancient Egypt", and I was saying "Maybe we were both involved in pyramid selling.." (laughter) anyway, so I came back to the office, and what landed on the desk, but a work by Sean Hillen with the Pyramids on Carlingford Lough!

S.H. Ah- it comes around and goes around.. (laughter) Well- they're funny- I mean I love all those word jokes- there's a lot of word play involved in them, and so that's the undercurrent- but there's a lot of stuff about Irish people being originally Egyptians, you know the Gypsies/Egyptian business, and there was a guy with a book, that he thought that the Irish people were connected to the Hittites of North Africa, and there's a connection between Irish dancing and North African footy dancing, so it's kind of fun... And there's the old Atlantean thing, you see, that's the Irelantis thing, so I've got all these lovely...

S.R. What's the Irelantis come from, that's the title under which all this exhibition sails?

S.H. Well... I just love the word - I invented the word, and I couldn't resist it, (laughter) got intoxicated by it... I started doing these things, in fact, as a little potboiler when I stopped doing the other work, I'd done nothing for about a year. And I wanted to make happy, healing pictures, and I started with a thing called 'The Colosseum of Cork', which is the Roman Colosseum (laughter), put in where Blarney Castle is.. and eh - they were just really for fun, and to make something light, and I hit on this idea, and then that whole thing caught fire...But the Irelantis thing, it's a great licence, because I'm sort of really interested...l Iove Nature; they're really Hymns to Nature, a lot of these things, and I love the idea of Nature coming and biting back, this kind of potential impending ecological troubles that we're having.

S.R. Indeed, some of the things that we are doing to this planet are more fantastical than some of the things you're doing here. I mean 'The Four Courts from The Temple of Apollo', would be an awful lot better scenario (laughter) than some of the hideousness people put up instead!

S.H. Yes, it's really nice, I love the classical things, they're quite evocative images, aren't they, the classical things, and they go back a long way, but then they're repeated again and again, a lot of us, we look at Victorian things, and we think they're ancient you know..

S.R. Have you got a favourite? I'm just looking, there's a particularly nice one here of 'Ecstatic Nuns outside the Casino at Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow'...

S.H. (laughs) Do you hear me- I laugh at them all myself, I find them so funny, it's probably not very good laughing at your own jokes...

S.R. (laughs) I think it is- if you can't laugh at them, you're not going to persuade anybody else to do that.

S.H. That's true- But I'm trying to make- I mean I'm a Fine Artist by training and I've spent years and years and years doing this, and nothing else, so they have to be objects that survive on their own, and go out into the world, and hopefully end up on Museum walls... I love that 'Goddess appears in Newgrange', and I love the 'Great Pyramids of Carlingford'... Do you know that, about Newgrange, that a lot of the granite came from the Cooley and Mournes area, that they shifted a huge amount of stone...

S.R. Oh did they?

S.H. Yes it's 200,000 tons of stone, and they shifted an awful lot of granite from the Mournes and Cooley, and you know it's 500 years older than the Pyramids, so there's a level of truth in there..

S.R. Yes, it certainly makes you pause to think, never mind how they got the Pyramids up, but how did they shift 200,000 tons of Mourne granite...

S.H. Well it wasn't all Mourne granite, they used a lot of very different stones subtly in the thing, they moved a lot of quartz from Wicklow- they had quite a sophisticated thing going there when they did it..

S.R. Well you see, it all seeps out from these pictures, they're absolutely wonderful lt's currently at Newry Arts Centre

S.H. Newry Arts Centre, 'till the 29th.

S.R. And catch it if you can, if you're either heading towards Newry, or you're hastening to any part of the island or continent of Irelantis (laughter)...

(ENDS)