The wonderful world of sean hillen

Sean hillen biography
Seán Hillen born 1961, in Ireland, is an artist whose work includes collages, photography and the creative use of photographs.
Seán Hillen is an artist whose work includes collages and the creative use of photographs.

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Before becoming a photographer, Sean Hillen was a tinkerer. As a young teenager, one of his favourite pastimes was to take apart his grandfather’s old cameras and then piece them back together again. It wasn’t long before he discovered that he could rewind a brand new 120 roll of film into an outmoded 620 camera. “I did that, I got them developed, and I was immediately addicted to photography”.

Hillen grew up through the Troubles in Newry, Northern Ireland, close to the border with the Republic of Ireland. “It was utter chaos,” he says. “I knew people who got killed, and I knew people who killed other people”. Hillen and his four siblings would lie awake in bed at night listening to gun battles, which were so frequent that they were able to distinguish between the sounds of different weapons.

After being arrested for stone-throwing as a teenager, Hillen’s parents decided to invest in his photography, hoping it would keep him from being drawn into the conflict like so many of his contemporaries. His father, who was a tinkerer too, had built a model railway

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Seán Hillen

Seán Hillen born 1961, in Ireland, is an artist whose work includes collages, photography and the creative use of photographs.

Early life

Seán Hillen was born in Newry, a border town on the Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border in County Down, Northern Ireland in 1961.^[1] Hillen grew up during the Troubles, which he described as "utter chaos".^[2] When he was a teenager his parents bought him his first camera to encourage his interest in photography and prevent him from being drawn into the conflict.^[2] Hillen studied at the Belfast College of Art.^[3] In 1982, he travelled to London to continue his studies at the London College of Printing,^[4] and then at the Slade School of Fine Art.^[5]

Troubles era works

Hillen traveled back and forth between Northern Ireland and England over the course of several years and began using his camera to document the conflict in Northern Ireland. Realising that print media was already saturated with images of The Troubles he began to incorporate his o

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Seán Hillen

Artist, born in 1961 in Newry, N.Ireland., Hillen lives and works in Dublin. He studied at Belfast College of Art, London College of Printing and the Slade School of Fine Art.

A ‘traditional’ collagist whose work has both popular and intellectual appeal, Hillen is recognised as one of the most significant Irish artists of his generation and a master of photomontage. He first gained notice in the U.K. for his early works based on his own photos from the Northern Irish 'troubles', (which have themselves recently been acquired as a permanent collection for the Irish National Library; Photographic Archive and published as ‘Melancholy Witness’ by The History Press in Ireland and in 2014 in the U.S.. Now republished as paperback in 2017.

The resulting photomontages since have become quite widely-known and are studied as examples of the medium.

(e.g. uk-india.britishcouncil.in/explore/belfast-city-tour/hist... )

In the 1990’s he moved to Dublin and began a new series titled ‘IRELANTIS’, which have come to be described as “the most vivid and emblemati