belfast
Seawrights works from Belfast, move through the physical landscape of his native city, mapping out the cultural, political and social divides that exist in the mind of its inhabitants. This place, here occupied by the camera, is a terrain vague, a no mans land, between communities, between cultures, between Northern Irelands past and its future. The works take three principal forms. Cages erected in front of pubs, making references to themes of exclusion, imprisonment and surveillance. Walls and fences on the edge of communities - somewhere between the two conflicting cultures, physical barriers that function as metaphors for deep seated philosophical polarization in Irish political culture. Thirdly - fire sites, burnt landscapes that reference the act of burning and destroying - an allegory for an imploding civil violence, self inflicted, brutal and dark.
