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© BBC N.Ireland 1994

John Toal: '...It's 8.30 now, on Your Place And Mine, and I'm sitting surrounded by very colourful images with unusual juxtapositions that are designed to make you look twice. For example, here's one taken from the Flagstaff above Newry looking down towards Carlingford Lough. It's a well known John Hinde postcard from the area, and there's a wee man in a red jumper surveying the whole scene. But, down near Warrenpoint just where Narrow Water Castle is, and on the southern side of Carlingford Lough, there are three massive pyramids, towering over the trees, and what else could the finished article be called, but 'The Great Pyramids of Carlingford Lough". Now, Leon McAuley, you met the imaginative artist responsible for this work. ..

Leon McAuley: 'Let me guess John- what you have there is a combined book of the work of Newry-born artist Sean Hillen.'

J. T: 'Exactly.'

L. McA: 'The man that I risked life and limb to track down not so long ago, and I think you'd agree that there's more in Sean Hillen's head than a combined book would take out.. He's a really remarkable artist, trained at the Slade. He works in a small scale to produce meticulous montages- images of religious devotion, space-race memorabilia, and his own gritty photographs of the troubles, all interwoven into an alternative reality; 'LondoNewry', his own ironic Tir na nOg of red buses, Bodie and Doyle, and John Hinde sunsets. Popular iconography is important to him...':

( CUT TO INTERVIEW:)

Sean Hillen: 'Yes, I suppose that's quite acute, because that's what they're about, they're about how reality is constructed, and they're kind of games about what our experience is, and about our own individual reality tunnels-, you know, the reality we inhabit, and how we share them and how they're very different-, how mine can be the same as yours and different at the same time. So what I've been doing is combining documentary pictures from the North, because I had this compulsion to take photographs, and then I started making collages from them to give them another life, and then I ended up making the photographs for the collages.'

L. McA: 'So you've got popular brightly technicoloured postcards cut up and sort of interspliced, sort of woven, nearly, with black and white photographs which actually you did take yourself.'

S.H: 'Indeed, it's a kind of a game about what's real and not real. I'm making places that appear to be very real, but they're obviously only real in dreams and nightmares, you know, but at the same time our conscious mind flips between seeing them as real and not seeing them as real, and I have to really do that in order to be honest about the thing. I'm not trying to hit people over the head with my understanding of reality, but I'm trying to suggest that this is a possible read ing of it..'

L. McA: The combination of that very bright colour of the postcards, the blue skies, the red jerseys that we all see, with the more gritty, black and white of the photographs is interesting. . .

S.H: I suppose I'm a reformed anarchist or something, and I see that all apparent civilisation, and most States are based on some violence in the past, you know, and we're all sitting watching our telly, eating our dinner and watching people starving at the other side of the world, so there is always this ambivalence, and nothing is as innocent and pure as it might appear to be..

L. McA: 'And yet, you know, there's a yearning, and I'm not so sure, first of all, that I'd agree entirely that you're a reformed anarchist, (laughs), but there is a yearning after that kind of innocence that you're talking about and talk ing about having been lost, that does seem to sort of reside in the postcard bit of it?'

S.H: 'Yeah, well that's about it, that one can go through life with certain attitudes to what's going on in the world, and you can go through life with another different set of attitudes, and we can both inhabit the same space and have very different ideas about who it belongs to, or what goes on, or who's in charge, you know, and what I'm trying to do is combine both these things visually, and get us thinking about what our relations actually are, to the Earth and to each other...'

L. McA: 'There's quite a strong autobiographical element in the pictures, I think you'll agree with me, and one, strangely, one of the icons who appears very often in the pictures is Yuri Gagarin, or as you call him 'Newry Gagarin'..?'

S.H: 'Well,.. artists have to have personas, I wish I had a separate one, quite often,..but eh, well I was born, sort of by jokey accident, about an hour after Gagarin landed, so he was Yuri Gagarin and it struck me that I could have this persona of the 'Newry Gagarin', and have myself as a spaceman and other 'spacemen' arriving, and it's kind of a joke about us being space creatures, you know, we can fly to space and look at the Earth from a long way away, and that's a profound experience, and also you can use the same intelligence to do brutal war on each other.
So it's a gift to an artist, that business, and I've just run with it.

L. McA: 'In fact, the one that I must say, I really like best, the one that impressed me most was, well no, it wasn't the one that impressed me most, they all impressed me in different ways, but the one that remained with me after I'd seen the exhibition, was a particular one of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a photograph of a whin bush, four actually, postcards cut up very carefully, surround ing the image of the Virgin, and the act of cutting those out gave a kind of three dimensionality and life hack to the whins that probably wasn't there in the photograph..?'

S.H: 'I'm really glad you see it like that, 'cause, I mean I love flowers, I love whin bushes, I always had a plan to take loads of whin bushes back to London and plant them round the place, . . '

L. McA: 'Maybe they'd call them gorse or something ..'

S.H: 'Maybe, exactly, indeed, but eh, my mother always used to say to me; "Sean, why can't you do pictures of lovely flowers", so finally I've got round to doing it..' (laughs) 'Also, in coming over all mystical really, in my later years, I really wanted to get Nature into the things more, and the whin bushes, I've put four of them together as you say and made a kind of vortex of flowers around this Apparition, and it's like a kind of strange druggy or kind of mystical experience, and it's also an image of Nature irrepressible, in fact, beautiful nature erupting, and absolutely unstoppable. . '

L. McA: 'Yes, and yet crawling through the whins, there are policemen, there are soldiers, there's a landrover parked behind the red brick wall..'

S.H: 'There's a wee very nervous soldier hiding under a block of flats, sitting at the bottom of it, in fact there's ... well I'll tell you anyway, a little story.. I was very keen to get that photograph, and I was sweating buckets that day, because I was the only photographer on Easter Sunday in Newry, taking photographs, and I went up to that wee soldier, he was about seventeen, and asked him could I take a picture, and he kind of jumped, because he didn't expect it, and he said "You want a picture sir? alright then.." and he posed for me.. .. and I was really pleased, because I hadn't got a soldier in contemporary dress, in the past year or so...'

L. McA: 'And you're satirising all sides, all beliefs, all attitudes and all positions?'

S.H: 'Absolutely, because I don't want to seem to be completely partisan, I mean that's my experience, but it's really about how human beings treat each other, and what is it to be a human being, do you know, and I hope that.. I really really try to make them open, saying this is one of my perceptions and my reality tunnel, but you can have another reality tunnel in the same space, and time, and we don't negate each other...'

John Toal: 'Leon McAuley with artist and Newryman Sean Hillen. Well Leon, he sounds like a remarkable person..'

L. McA: 'Fantastic work John, I really enjoyed when I saw the exhibition that's on at the moment at Clotworthy House., but there's more in Sean's head, as I said, than a gun would take out... He's not only an artist but an inventor as well, actually he invented a contraption five or six years ago that won him a substantial prize in a national competition, and it was taken up commercially, and he tells me that he has a few other nice inventions still up his sleeve, and I would believe him, though mind you, he didn't tell me what they were...'

J. T: 'He didn't tell you what they were?'

L. McA: 'No, he didn't, not only is he a dedicated artist, but he's a very very clever man... The work as you know, is extraordinarily time-consuming, did you enjoy it yourself ?'

J. T: 'I really did. I loved the Newry Gagarin, I thought that was excellent, now.'

L. McA: 'Aha. Well one of the things I liked about the work was not only the wit and the juxtapositions of the images, but the titles of the images themselves.. He sees himself I think as a satirist in the Swiftian mode, and admires writers like Flann O'Brien, and that humour with serious intent is very exciting. I was going round the exhibition giggling with glee, and there aren't many exhibitions of serious art that make you laugh.. well sorry in fact there are quite a few, but Sean actually intends to...'

(ENDS)