the forest
First exhibited at the Hasselblad Centre/Museum of Fine Art Gotenberg in 2001 (catalogue). In Northern Ireland the forest was convenient, the edge of Belfast and Derry are surrounded by hills, mountains, countless acres of countryside and woodland that are unpopulated and unpoliced. Slipping away from the streetlights of the city you are plunged unmercifully into blackness. This place - somewhere between the urban and the rural, between darkness and light is a no-mans land. It isn't politicised like the wasteground between Protestant and Catholic housing estates in Belfast where I have worked before, but it is an equally tense space, unoccupied, silent and unfamiliar. The edges of forests, woods and expansive fields are tantalisingly mapped by the orange glow of the last light from the city. It is a paradoxical site, a fearful yet beautiful landscape that implies a malevolence somewhere between the real and the imagined.
