Division and conflict inscribed in landscape

VISUAL ARTS:EVERY PICTURE TELLS a story. And, being as smart as we humans are, and living in a visual culture as we do, we learn to read the stories in pictures all too well. Across the spheres of news, entertainment and propaganda, images are tailored to fit our preconceptions. All of which takes away from the image's capacity to actually say anything new about the world.

For many people who work with images, and indeed for many people who hold images in critical regard, this can be frustrating and unsatisfactory. Inevitably, such individuals try to evade the bounds of convention, to step outside the predictable circle of production and consumption.

Which is where photographer Paul Seawright comes in. He is one of those people dissatisfied with the generic limitations of pictorial language. Peripheries, an exhibition of his work at Navan's Solstice Arts Centre, gathers together pieces from several of his many series of photographs. Born in 1965, Seawright grew up during the bad years of the Troubles. The decisive event of his artistic education was encountering influential English photographic artist Paul Graham, who pioneered a mode of analytical, critical, documentary colour photography. Crucially, Graham was wary of journalistic and pictorial conventions. His images are oblique and unorthodox, and not susceptible to easy assimilation.

In the mid-1980s he made a series of photographs in Northern Ireland, eventually gathered under the title Troubled Land. Rather than focusing on newsworthy incidents and pictorial drama, he documented the way division and conflict were subtly, and not so subtly – but always unmistakably – inscribed in the urban and rural landscapes of the North. Seawright adopted this approach himself for his first notable project, his Sectarian Murder series, made in 1988, and shown as part of Peripheries. He went back through his diaries, in which he had recorded instances of sectarian murder, and visited the sites where the bodies of the victims had been discovered.

His photographs of the sites are accompanied by brief news descriptions of the circumstances, usually quite horrific, of each killing, omitting only the religion of the murdered person. As you might expect, the locations where the bodies were left are for the most part quiet, marginal and poorly lit, patches of wasteground and other anomalous in-between spaces. While the tone of the images is calm and dispassionate, there is at the same time an intimation of unease, partly to do with our instinctive awareness of the dangers implicit in such places, an instinct borne out by the concise textual explanations.

Two aspects of this series have come to characterise pretty much everything Seawright has done since. One is his concern with a content beyond routine pictorial convention, to the extent that, as he expressed it himself, “I have always been fascinated by the invisible, the unseen, the subject that doesn’t easily present itself to the camera”. The other is the idea of an anomalous, undefined, uneasy space, apparently nondescript but charged with information about the social and political fabric all around it. Another aspect of Sectarian Murder, though, is untypical of his subsequent work: the textual accompaniment. He’s since preferred to let the images stand alone.

That can be difficult, particularly when the significance of an image is to all intents and purposes latent, when information with regard to location and context is scant or non-existent, and we are left to interpret what we see on the basis of our own estimation of accident and intent. In a way, of course, that’s a good thing in itself, because rather than passively consuming imagery we are prompted to ask ourselves what exactly we’re looking at. Still, certain risks are involved. The work treads a fine line between engaging members of its potential audience and simply stonewalling them.

As it happens, Seawright has great visual flair, even as he avoids the standard approaches to pictorial narrative. Works drawn from several series documenting the “malevolent landscape” of Belfast and beyond, from the pre-ceasefire days of the early 1990s, to the problematic peace ushered in by the Belfast Agreement, feature in Peripheries.

Seawright spent time with what was then the RUC, and with the Orange Order. Post-ceasefire he’s explored the boundaries between the two communities, in the sense both of an immediate physical division and those ambiguous peripheral spaces. He’s very effectively worked in environments beyond Northern Ireland, including several countries on the European mainland and in Afghanistan.

What’s striking in many of his close-up images of the urban fabric of Belfast is the low-key but relentless evidence of protracted conflict. That is, rather than isolated events, we see a desperately inhospitable, contested environment, shaped by the imperatives of aggression and defence, scarred, battered, beaten, burnt, adorned with assertions and denials of identity. It’s cumulatively very powerful and disturbing.

AT DRAÍOCHT, Ronan McCrea's New Town Centre Project(Extract no 1) doesn't quite leave one keenly anticipating the full thing. The words "inspired by Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project" sound a note of foreboding. Often referenced by artists, the Arcades Project, a multi-layered study of city life centred on the Parisian shopping arcades, was an unfinished, incomplete and disordered collection of manuscripts at the time of Benjamin's premature death. The status of published versions is open to question, but they have nonetheless provided a mine of useful material for artists and theorists.

McCrea takes the idea of a patchwork structure and looks to the Blanchardstown Centre, sealing off the gallery and, within its darkened space, projecting slides taken within and around the centre, together with a soundtrack commentary. Many ideas are invoked, including “retail theory and practice . . . the privatisation of public space” and more. But the end result is curiously bland and amorphous, as though the myriad references and research have not been shaped into a concerted work – a bit like Benjamin’s Arcades, perhaps.

Perhaps McCrea will do more with the material in the future.

Upstairs at Draíocht, Ross McDonnell's The New Brilliantfeatures paintings employing gesture, geometric and architectonic forms, and pattern. They are busy works, and their fast-paced, complicated surfaces refer to the hectic over-layering of the contemporary cultural landscape, in which signs and images succeed each other and intermingle in constantly surprising ways. McDonnell is a very capable painter and there is a genuine sense of discovery to his work, though he is much more comfortable on a smaller scale – those pieces are outstanding, and more convincingly resolved than the larger canvases.

Peripheries: Photographic Workby Paul Seawright, Solstice Arts Centre, Railway Street, Navan, until Mar 28. New Town Centre Project(Extract no 1), by Ronan McCrea, and The New Brilliant, paintings by Ross McDonnell, both at Draíocht, Blanchardstown Centre, until Apr 4