[paper crinkling]
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[man] I like that sound.
[classical music playing]
[woman] An art exhibition took place at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin
and it generated huge interest.
It's off on its way to London now, and it is the work of Seán Hillen.
[man] Armed only with a scalpel, glue,
and the world's biggest collection of John Hinde postcards,
Hillen creates a new strange world he calls "Irelantis."
[woman] It was a huge success, and it's now in a book.
[Seán] Collected in a book, I'm such a lucky boy.
[man] Among other things, Seán designed an album cover recently
for Super Furry Animals.
[man 2] It was great to see the scalpel edges as well.
There was no Photoshop.
[Seán] One of the joys and difficulties of montages is that you can only work with
exactly what you have in front of you, and then it's sort of a dance.
[Seán] I get very mixed messages from the work.
I think I've made good pictures.
[shouting]
[camera shutter clicks]
And I've failed to make a living at it.
I've got this work and I really care about it and I want it to be seen.
And it doesn't really mean anything if it's not seen.
You know, this should be three people with cotton gloves, really.
[laughs]
This is the one that's on the cover of the book on Irish art,
which I always point out, because I'm so proud of it.
My life probably doesn't really mean anything if that work isn't seen.
My project at the moment is to save my skin.
[clock ticking]
[cool jazz playing]
This is my little house, my studio,
my little empire.
It's like a little bunker.
I don't feel like I own it. I mean, the bank own it, very definitely.
My impulse is just take you and walk around it.
It's an extraordinary little house.
The kitchen's like a galley off a boat, but it's just perfect for me, actually.
So I've been here, maybe, I don't know, 12, 13 years.
This is my living room, but I actually kind of live here.
And this is my bed.
And it was my big investment when I moved in.
It's a nice, big, heavy, actually comfortable sofa bed.
But the room is so full and I'm on my own here so much
that I made sure to get one that was big enough for me to sleep on this way.
Well, the situation is, you see, I've been an artist for 40 years,
but I discovered that I'm an Asperger person about four or five years ago.
The Asperger's brain, you know, it's autistic.
And one of its things is this kind of hoarding activity that I do.
I love things and I make a lot of things. And I kind of tend to accrete stuff.
You could call it executive functioning.
Here, I counted one day and there were 140 little people in this room.
And that turns out to be an Asperger thing, which is very strange.
[jazz playing]
[camera shutter clicking]
[footsteps approach]
Well, I've been referring to this as my Amy shrine,
kind of jokingly and seriously.
This wonderful girl called Amy Madden I met on…
I've been Internet meeting for the last few years,
and I met her just about a year ago.
She said she liked natural disasters.
I thought… what a woman!
And then I saw her art. And her art is amazing.
An amazing site. It's all, you know, you answer a lot of questions.
I answered 1800 questions.
And they match your personality and your core values to the other person.
So that's how we ended up meeting.
I had to go to Chicago to find her, kind of.
- [woman] Have you ever met her in person? - No.
But she's coming to Dublin in just a few weeks' time.
For both of us, it's like an extravagant, crazy thing to do,
and at the same time…
could be the best thing we've ever done.
Well… oh, my gosh.
The front room here.
Oh, gosh.
I shouldn't sound so miserable about it, but I don't like to look at it like this
because it's so… I'm so stuck with it.
Oh, and my grandfather's clock. This is great.
It's just a Vienna wall clock.
It's not an expensive clock or an exotic one.
So my grandfather repaired clocks,
and this is a birthday card that my granny sent me when I was five.
Loads and loads of kisses on it. It's a really sweet thing.
Anyway, this is the clock that, when it's put properly vertical,
it goes "tick tock, tick tock."
And when it's put the other way, it goes "tock tick, tock tick."
And now I've got it sort of going…
[clock ticking]
Tock… It's pretty even.
Anyway, I'm going to head further upstairs and show you this place.
[sighs]
Yes. Well.
So this is the proper studio studio.
[jazz playing]
I mean, what is there here?
There's a lot of stuff that only I value probably.
And I have hoards of postcards.
This is stuff that was cut probably 20 years ago.
I mean, I must have thousands of cards.
And I love the kind of excitement of going through and finding something.
It's kind of nothing, but it's kind of charming and humorous.
You know, sometimes I come up here and I feel excited,
and sometimes I come up here and I feel repelled and overwhelmed by it.
And it's not good because you want to…
if you're making art, you want to feel the possibility and hunger and excitement,
not a cesspit of kind of guilt and…
struggle and pain and failure.
It kind of reminds me of where I'm failing.
It's a little bit of a prison, and it's stopping me working,
is the most important thing, actually.
I'm physically and psychologically incapable of doing the work.
I'm just overwhelmed by just too many things.
I look at the desk and it makes me nauseous and I don't want to look at it.
Painful things I don't want to look at or think about or do.
[jazz playing]
[woman] How are you making your money now?
[Seán] I'm not making money.
I'm living on disability benefit and a trickle of print sales.
[straining]
So those are all unframed, unsigned.
God…
That's when you wonder why you bother.
Normally what I did for the last few years,
how I paid the mortgage was selling original works
because I had a back catalogue.
I've made about 230 collage works over the years.
I'm running out of the back catalogue
and I'm forced to sell the back catalogue dirt cheap, which is really, really bad.
"A," they're not in museums, they're not in public collections,
and "B," they're gone at low prices, which is disastrous.
In the meantime, I'm spiraling down a plughole.
This is my big seller.
"Big seller" means maybe one print per market, you know.
That's good.
I've got a great big space. It's great.
Hi there. Thanks for looking.
Everything's basically half the gallery price and I'm slightly famous.
I'm on the cover of the book on Irish art.
Just desperate, that's what it is. [chuckles]
- [Seán] Hello, hello, hello. - [man] How are you doing?
[Seán] Crazy busy.
[man] Good. Always a good complaint.
[Seán] Yes, kind of.
I thought it's about time I did a stock check,
which I haven't done in ages.
[man] I'm just going to have a look and do…
Have you noticed anything moving recently?
- Yeah, the A4s. - Oh, should know.
I'm going to have to put them to 30 because it's stupid money.
There you go, yeah.
The big ones are 200.
Ouch. You know, that's a big buy.
And most people are coming in to buy a gift.
So, 200 is like a wedding gift.
People do buy them for wedding gifts and stuff.
The problem is, do I sell fewer at higher price, or more at low price?
And the pressure is down, down all the time.
So this is the new move to print at 25, 30 euros.
[sighs]
I'd have thought people would buy that more.
I think when they're like this, they just flip by.
I think those would be better like that.
For so many years now, I've just been worried about money all the time.
It got to the point of the sheriff at the door
and them digging up the gas and cutting me off
and, you know, the electricity going out.
Well, the kind of mind I have, I used to call it a butterfly mind.
Like I'm endlessly interested in things.
[bicycle bell jingles]
But I'm completely not interested in ordinary life.
I can't. I'd rather jump in the canal than go to an office.
Literally would.
[jazz playing]
This, oh, my God, is a job I've been putting off for so long.
These are early Irelantis collages
that were bought for the state collection.
1998.
This is what this collage should look like,
and this is what it does look like after 30 years in the sun.
It's wrecked. Some of it is retrievable. So I've pulled the whole thing apart.
In theory, that's a 10,000 quid collage.
Although the OPW paid a couple of hundred for it or something.
So this is another one, a silly thing called
Feeding Time Near the Great Pyramids.
Thankfully I have a second postcard that it came from,
but actually, with this one, my bloody camel man is the problem.
Somewhere in the studio
I think there's a print or a scan of this in its original color.
I've agreed a thousand quid with them to do it.
I was actually going to do it to try and get some more cash for Amy coming over.
- Which reminds me… - [telephone dialing]
- Hello? - [woman on phone laughs]
Hello. Hi, sweetness.
- [Amy] Hi. How are you? - How are you?
I am pretty damn good, thank you.
- Marvelous. - I woke up not scared this morning.
- So did I. - I like the sound of that.
Well, I just ordered a travel pillow…
[Seán] Whoo-hoo!
…and a travel blanket.
Travel socks, travel booties…
[footsteps approach]
[woman] So this is the file store of the National Irish Visual Arts Library.
The collecting remit covers Irish artists from 1900 to the present day.
Okay, so this drawer contains the material we've collected on Seán Hillen,
and it's sitting in the same drawer with Paul Henry.
If you take a look at Seán's file,
you can see here exhibition catalogues from the '90s,
press clippings,
price lists.
And we have a copy of Irelantis.
This is the archived copy
and it's been kept in pristine condition with no markings on it.
We have material that Seán has given to the library himself
nearly 20 years ago now, at this stage.
He's certainly a very important artist.
I think working at a time of political unrest,
having grown up in the north in the advent of the Troubles.
I mean, his work is very tactile, it's intensely visual,
and it has a political basis, a historic basis
that I think is very attractive to students at the moment.
I would have bumped into Seán
or met Seán at various events over the years
since this initial deposit,
and he always spoke about adding more material to the collection,
but it never actually materialized.
[Seán] This is the type of paper that it is. Planteen.
[printer whirring]
I grew up in this deep, messy war, dirty war.
Whoo-hoo!
So, growing up in the Troubles made me an artist in a way
that I mightn't have been.
It's great.
So this Sister Faustina picture, I always call it, I'll zoom it up.
It's actually two of my own photographs.
So this layer down here, this is Newry town center
and one of the main shopping centers.
[camera shutter clicking, crowd clamoring]
There was a Republican parade on around 1990
and there were loads of cops blocking the road and hanging around.
Of course, everybody's very nervous. I'm not allowed to photograph them.
It's illegal.
I'm trying to ignore these two policemen, RUC men,
and he's trying to hide his face, I think, because I've lifted the camera.
The thing about it is, I don't want to show their faces.
If I showed their faces, it could help them be set up for assassination.
I don't want to do that.
And I have this picture that I've been toying with.
This is the South Bank of London.
There's the Oxo Tower and the Hayward Gallery Festival Hall.
I used to live nearby and I love that whole area.
So this was my territory and I used to walk up the riverbank a lot.
Liked it a lot.
And this is my territory too.
This is the observation posts and bunkers and towers and tunnels
that was at the border on the Dublin Road in Newry.
It's like 200 or 300 yards from my sister's house.
It's surrounded by 60 feet of anti-rocket fence.
It's like the aliens have landed and they're not very nice.
It's where we went past all the time,
and where, you know, you would hold your breath a little bit.
It was unusual that I collaged these two things,
but I want to really, really squeeze all that tension…
into one thing.
[church bell chiming]
Anyway, I had this problem with these two policemen,
and I used this picture of Sister Faustina,
and the story about it is about my granny.
She was a wonderful woman, very bright.
She had these two hobbies, one of which was the Daily Mail crossword.
The other was picking people out of the phone book
and sending them holy pictures.
And her favorite thing to send was this Sister Faustina,
and it made the picture for me because it all folds together,
and it's called Sister Faustina
Appears in London-Newry,
Miraculously Preventing
the Illegal Photography
of Members of the Security Forces.
[percussion riff plays]
[movie projector whirring]
[woman] There's five of us, I'm the oldest.
Seán is second youngest.
[man] As soon as we'd come home from school, we'd get a football.
That's what we wanted to do.
Later on, out to throw stones at the army or something.
Something normal.
It was just part of growing up.
It was just something to do.
You'd just come home from school.
You knew there was an army patrol coming in at quarter past five
or was going to the Armagh Road at quarter to six,
and you were ready for them both ways.
But Seán would be out in the coal shed
looking for something to take apart or something.
[woman] We would have thought he was exceptionally clever.
Stand out clever.
Always making things.
No matter what toy he was bought, it had to come apart
so that he could see how it worked.
Daddy was always buying stuff in auctions.
So the shed and the house would have been full of bits and pieces
and Seán would have found something out of it,
and made something out of it.
Asperger's wouldn't have even come into people's reckoning.
You would have thought he was different
from the non-face recognition of people
to the non-reading of their expression,
their disorderly mind in some respects,
but very orderly in other respects.
[Seán] You know, as a child I was hyper self-conscious,
so I was probably a little weirdo.
But I had no idea. I thought everybody was like that.
My parents, they were incredibly loving and tender.
I woke up every morning to hot buttered toast beside the bed
and my clothes warming in front of a fire,
which is incredibly loving, isn't it?
It's just amazing, really.
That's a very Asperger thing,
this intense relationship with one or both of the parents.
And mothers tend to mother them a lot.
And I was definitely one of those, you know.
The downside to that was that I wasn't prepared for the world at all.
Nikon FM was my camera for years and years and years.
Well, I shot all my photos during the Troubles era,
that ended up in the National Library.
I only started photographing Troubles stuff from when I was like 17.
I would actually watch something happening,
and I would be able to raise the camera for a quick click and be away.
And then I would wander with it to my eye, you know,
and it's got a lovely wide field of view,
so I might be sort of over there, but still photographing you.
- [camera shutter clicks] - [men clamoring, shouting]
And at the same time, you know, if somebody puts this in your face
and waits, you kind of get a reaction, so I would actually use it
and I would be watching out of this eye as well for anything else to happen.
I feel at home with it, you know.
It gave me a way of looking at the Troubles as an outsider.
[Elizabeth] Well, I met Seán about ten years ago,
and he had an exhibition with Photo Ireland at the time,
which centered around his montages, his artworks.
We got chatting and he explained to me
that he had loads of the original photographs and I asked to see them.
So Seán brought us in several plastic bags of photographs.
There's over 500 of them and we acquired them subsequently.
The richness is that he actually documents
Northern Ireland from an angle that's extremely rare
and, in my experience, unique.
[camera shutter clicks]
It's not a photojournalist collection.
[camera shutter clicking]
[crowd clamoring]
Seán's angle was very different.
[camera shutter clicking]
His collection was done for him.
He was reared indoors in this cocoon of love and support,
and then outside the house in Newry,
there was the violence,
extreme poverty,
the terror, the explosions,
fractured childhoods, destroyed lives.
He's got one amazing photograph of an alleyway
in an extremely deprived area in Derry.
And you capture one little child in a doorway, you know, all by himself.
Seán's images, they are raw.
They capture an emotional response.
And he explained to me at one point
that he was given a choice of either a gun or a camera.
And he chose the camera.
[Seán] You know, I had these pictures and I knew there were strong pictures.
[martial band playing]
And when I went to London, I got into very good media school,
the best media school, probably because of those photos.
But I discovered immediately that nobody really wanted to see those photos.
[reporter] Not only can the IRA find safety,
it's in effective control of the population.
The newspapers were saturated with it.
[protestors chanting]
So there was no…
taste for more bloody photographs of Northern Ireland, you know?
[camera shutter clicking]
I really wanted people to see what I was seeing,
what was going on, you know, what was really going on.
- [officer] Fire! - [guns firing]
[protestors clamoring]
I knew that they weren't going to get published,
so I started manipulating them and doing things with them,
adding things to them, taking things out of them.
To try and make them more interesting,
to make them say more.
Photographs weren't complex enough.
I wanted to contain my feelings in them,
and that was the job of the collages.
[papers shuffling]
[serene music playing]
There would be very common behaviors in some Asperger types,
like drinking a great deal.
Depression would be very common
and it's partly to do with the crazy ambitions
and the lack of worldliness.
You know, you can't really figure your place in the world.
I've spent most of my life anxious and worried
and wondering what the hell was going on with me.
[percussion riffs playing]
[camera shutter clicking rapidly]
See the horseshoe-y shape in the bottom of it?
Well, I'm definitely obsessed with clouds and UFOs at the moment.
I think that I'm on to something.
I see structure in these clouds
that I don't think ought to be there.
I do think it's my art too.
I'm kind of resigned to people not getting it for another 30 years or something.
And then they'll go, "Oh, God, he was on about the clouds then,
before we all knew about the clouds."
[man] Well, I've known Seán for years.
A few years ago, my daughter,
who doesn't work with Asperger's, but she works in that field,
picked up, the landline phone, Seán rang me.
And she had a quick sort of… they exchanged a few pleasantries.
And as I was coming down the stairs, I think she said something like,
"Dad, has Seán got Asperger's?" I said, "I've no idea."
Anyway, I think Seán heard that with the phone while it was down and…
[bell chimes]
[Seán] That was an overwhelming experience actually.
For a few days afterwards, I went…
Oh, my God, everything has changed a bit.
Even to get the formal diagnosis from an expert.
It's like unfolding a cardboard box, and you can see how it's made.
[Greg] I think Seán does need management, management in his life.
The practical stuff. He's often trying to get me to come.
"I'll pay you to come and do this because I need an adult to come and hold my hand."
[Seán] Like, literally, I don't know what day it is today.
I literally don't know what day it is.
I can't remember what I'm doing from one moment to the next.
And it could be critically important, life important things.
I'm just highly distractible.
[shutter clicking rapidly]
Good bit of square gap in the cloud up there.
[Greg] Seán's Asperger's has given us all of that art.
He's just got so many ideas on the go. He just needs to actually make the stuff.
But if he dropped dead tomorrow, his work is on something like 40 book covers.
It's part of Ireland's identity.
They don't become less relevant somehow.
[Seán] One, two,
three, four, five.
Look at that. I see rectangular structures there.
I see three dimensional things
and forms that I don't really think ought to be there.
Look, there's another.
Do you see? That bar-shaped thing there.
There are two things this could be.
It could be UFOs and it could be weather modification.
And we know that different countries do weather modification.
They use electromagnetic and chemical things.
They can make it rain or not rain.
I know it sounds completely bonkers, but I just don't think that's natural.
So this is what I'm hoarding.
[woman] How many shots have you got?
[Seán] Well, I've worn out two professional cameras
that get to about a quarter million frames each.
So because of that, I know I have at least half a million frames.
[jazz playing]
I did a show of the clouds.
The Irish Times review said that the weird thing was
that they looked manipulated, but they weren't,
which was a great response as far as I was concerned.
But the show cost me three and a half thousand quid to print
and 320 people attended over a month.
So I could have given them a tenner each and not bothered.
[man shouting in distance]
[Seán] Puss, puss, puss. [whooshing]
Mikey.
[peaceful music playing]
It's one thing when you're 25 or 35
to be, you know, living a bohemian life and drinking a lot
and making your pictures at any cost.
But I can't go on doing that.
I was able to work in poverty in the past, but I can't do it anymore.
It's all got too serious and I'm too old.
But then, you know, I'm never going to be Mr. 9-to-5.
You know, I still don't want a job.
So that's where I am.
Here's a short musical interlude
for those extremists and other eccentrics among you.
♪ One, two, three o'clock Four o'clock rock ♪
♪ Five, six, seven o'clock Eight o'clock rock ♪
♪ Nine, ten, eleven o'clock Twelve o'clock ♪
♪ Rock ♪
♪ We're gonna rock Around the clock tonight ♪
[jazz playing]
[Seán chuckles]
I got into the Slade, which was an amazing, amazing thing.
My college course was all paid for. I never paid a penny.
We didn't have any money. It was very, very hard to get into.
And here we are.
It's a guided tour for the folks.
We were called Media Fine Art,
but it meant you could do anything, really.
Seány's studio.
To be in the Slade School, this was the stamp of artistic integrity, you know?
You get the idea here. There's a Land Rover in a ditch.
This is called Three Visitors from North America,
Impressed by an Anglo Irish Country.
I was making robots,
and I did a performance work.
I got a toy Italian cap gun and drilled out the barrel.
This is the state.
And this is its culture.
State culture.
[gun pops]
I got a lot of attention for the Slade show.
[in background] …and this is its culture.
State culture.
[man singing Irish ballad]
I recorded my father singing
and made a singing leprechaun inside an animated sculpture,
and I got selected for the top cream of the Masters shows
for an article for Time Out.
The collages were really my strength, and that's what I was showing.
And I was getting then magazine covers,
and I was live on Greater London radio one afternoon.
[host] And the exhibition includes the work of Seán Hillen,
who joins me now.
You use photographs as a basis from which to create a collage, don't you?
[Seán] Yes, I'm a fine artist by training…
So, you know, I come out with a bit of momentum.
I kind of thought it was going to be fine, I think.
[reporter] The explosion, just before seven this morning,
was heard over a wide area of north London.
It ripped through the living quarters
where the soldiers were getting up for duty.
Eyewitnesses said the building crumpled like a pack of cards.
As nearly as quickly as I had a big flurry of attention and a lot of publication,
and then just as quickly, I couldn't get the bloody things published.
[man speaking indistinctly on television]
The peace process was coming
and people didn't want what was seen as provocative work, you know.
The last big show that I had in Britain was in the Ikon Gallery,
the biggest photography-inclined gallery in Britain.
I had a lot of work in it because I had a lot of good Troubles work at that point.
I thought it was a breakthrough show,
but I didn't know that the other political stuff was happening
and that I was, you know, becoming persona non grata at the same time.
[father singing Irish ballad]
The War Museum tried to buy the whole work.
Twenty-six of my remaining 30 collages for £50,000, I agreed over the phone.
And were refused the money.
I suddenly had to realize I had a ginormous overdraft
and no money coming.
And I knew what it meant.
It was terrifying actually.
[jazz playing]
I was just on the phone to my art dealer.
And…
And they have a group show that I'm not in because I have no new work.
Right.
You're an ex-artist, kind of, if you don't have new work coming.
If you're not exhibiting, you're not in people's consciousness,
so you're not hot, you know.
So…
I've been thinking about the studio.
I really, really, really kind of want to clear it and ask for help, actually.
[telephone ringing]
- Hello? - Maurice.
- Hi, Seán, how's it going? - You're so glad to hear from me.
- Yeah, I am, yes. - You're so sweet.
You're alive, anyhow. I thought you were dead.
- [laughs] - [phone ringing]
- [man] How are you doing? - Hi. I'm all right. Listen…
And I know that you're probably up to your tits, and it's probably ridiculous.
And also the Amy thing. Amy is coming here.
That's an adventure to come shortly.
I could have a heart attack tomorrow, or the bus could get me or whatever.
And what's going to happen?
My daddy used to say, "It'll all go in the skip."
I mean, life wise, I need to do this.
I mean, I'm terrified about it.
But life's too short, you know?
And the bus is coming for us all.
Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.
Rubbish, rubbish.
[percussion riffs playing]
We're going to take everything out.
I've got a friend with a van and I've hired a bit of a space round the corner.
- [cracks] - Oh, God. Let's go.
- Thank you. - [woman] Lovely. Thank you.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Seán sighs] Christ.
[bric-a-brac clattering]
- Do you want me to put it in here? - I haven't a clue at the moment.
Um…
Let's just put all this in the one box. Yeah, let's put it all in there.
That should actually just go in the fucking bin.
- [woman] The recycling bin? - Bin, bin, bin, bin, bin.
[woman] Bin, bin, bin!
Can we get a big bag up here? Thank you.
So that's the box before last of the toys,
can we bung them in this and find a lid for it?
They belong to these bits.
Be careful about the faces of them, because they're vulnerable.
[straining]
Electronics.
If you could just put a lid on that. Jesus.
I wondered where these cassettes were.
[bell chimes]
Oh, my God. Wonderful things.
Soldiers.
You know, they say when you die
and your fucking life runs in front of you,
here it is coming out of plastic boxes.
[strains]
[jazz playing]
- [man] Seán, will you grab that for me? - [woman] Seán, does this work?
- [man] Seán. - [woman] Seán.
Seán, these, what do you think?
[announcers] …Newry man Seán Hillen. …from the artist Seán Hillen.
…with Seán Hillen. …Seán Hillen…
[door bangs]
Oh, my God. Here we have heaven and hell.
We have summons or horrible solicitors letters.
Very young Seán.
It's kind of really sweet and hopeful, actually, isn't it?
Very lucky, really. Lucky child. Didn't know what was coming.
It was wonderful until…
I don't know if I told you the story.
When I was ten, I woke up one morning
and there were very large armored cars outside, going…
[imitating loud engines]
Very loud. And it was the morning of internment.
And I looked through the venetian blinds just in time to see
one of the teenage neighbors being dragged by two soldiers,
literally dragged actually, and chucked in the back of an armored car.
And you didn't know whether you were going to see him again.
Yeah.
- [woman] Those lads were your neighbors? - Yeah.
Yeah. We were just the wrong age, you know.
Could have been us. One of them was an IRA member, other ones weren't.
They just grabbed everybody. That was internment.
It was a desperate act and it inflamed everybody.
Of course, then I was… That was it. That was war.
I was ten then.
So that's when it all went to shit.
[woman] And if you hadn't discovered photography,
where would your life have gone?
I don't know.
Anyway…
Don't want to look at that.
That's when the bank sued me
after the War Museum failed to buy my pictures.
And that's what I had to deal with for years, is…
legal actions against me.
This is the height of the censorship.
I mean, the War Museum had never been refused the money in their history.
And after a year, I borrowed against it.
It was very naive of me.
I'm actually very emotional.
[woman] It's okay.
I feel humiliated by it.
It's just too much today going through these things.
[Frances] Newry at the time was, I suppose, worrying.
I would not like my children to be living through that.
No matter where you were, there were bomb scares,
some of them real and some not.
And you just left and went out.
[explosion]
[Jim] You just accepted these things.
You didn't… If somebody was murdered…
you would just pass it off.
It was just, as I say, normal.
[Frances] Daddy was always involved…
Although he was a bus driver,
he would always be involved in politics.
He stood for the SDLP one time.
He would have been a liaison with the army,
a sort of go-between person.
So Seán would have been very aware of that,
but Seán would have been falling on the Republican side,
as were all the boys,
probably because of the hassle they got from the army.
[Jim] When I was going to work, I had to pull up against the wall
about four times before I'd actually reach work.
It was all hassle.
You hoped you didn't meet the foot patrols,
but you knew if you met the first one, there was three more to come.
[Seán] We were terrified of the British Army.
When I was 14, the British Army shot a 12-year-old a couple of streets away.
It could have been me, it could have been anyone else, we were aware of that.
And the soldier got away with it, was protected and got away with it.
So we knew what reality was.
You know, there was terror.
[gunshot]
The truth is, I've never told anybody before,
but I was stopped by my da at the age of 14,
on my way to burn Woolworth's myself with a homemade incendiary bomb.
Which must have frightened the life out of him.
[Frances] Seán would have been used for his brain power
because he could do things.
We don't know where he got the stuff to make the incendiary device
or what sort of incendiary device he was making.
I just know that it was big, bigger than you would have expected.
But Daddy must have been keeping an eye on him.
He would have been watchful, I would say.
[Seán] I was a child, you know, but I was so angry and so upset.
And there's an element of the chaos to it
that you kind of want to burn the place down
that appeals to the young male mind, I think.
[explosions, shouting]
[Frances] Daddy realized he was involved
with people that he shouldn't have been involved with,
and Daddy had to go and talk to somebody to get him out of it.
Because apparently once you were involved, you couldn't get out.
He was only a teenager, he was still in school at the time.
[camera shutter clicking]
[Seán] I think I would have destroyed myself probably,
you know, out of my anger, if I hadn't kind of escaped it.
Photography was a lucky find.
[sighs]
This is what life ought to be like.
I used to think this kind of life was for other people
and that I was kind of stuck with my mess.
And now I don't feel that.
[clock ticking]
[percussion riffs playing]
I like lying on the floor, and I haven't been able to.
There's something very calming about it.
I'm unusually speechless.
Now this stuff is all out, I can see how bloody much of it there is.
But it's not as overwhelming now that I have a different attitude to it.
These are obsolete.
These are scuzzy cables which seemed important.
They used to be 40 quid apiece,
and I don't want them anymore.
And I have four billion euro power cables.
That's a decent HDMI cable, that can stay.
That's a broken lock that I have to photograph.
I love broken locks. They're so sad.
But I don't need to own them.
That's two boxes reduced to a quarter of a box.
This is so gratifying.
I don't think I find dumping stuff that hard.
[martial drum beating]
- Hello. Hi. - Looks good.
Oh, gosh, far more stuff, really, than I thought.
And they're records of work that I forgot that I did.
This is a test print for a billboard campaign that was all around the country.
And I don't know… as well as which it's hybrid, is it art?
How much does this matter to you?
- It matters hugely. - And I'm open to your…
- Does it? - Yeah, absolutely.
- [woman] They're important to you. - Yes.
And they're most certainly important to the record of your work.
Yes.
Anyway, I'm going to get you more, there's a little bit more in the car.
Okay. Do you need a hand?
- Probably. - Probably. Okay.
- [drum beating] - You got it?
- Yeah. - There's the first bit.
I wonder whether…
Super.
More and more and more.
Anyway…
- Oh, my God, this is my other life. - This is an invention.
This is my life as an inventor.
This is me very early as an inventor.
So this is the first printing machine.
I invented a way to print big pictures very cheaply,
and I won second prize in the biggest competition in Britain.
Then I was trying to do these other bits and pieces.
A Stanley knife that sharpens itself.
Every time it draws the blade in, it sharpens it.
That's a computer pen before there were computer pens.
This was a good idea. It actually worked.
Hillen Products, yes.
So this continued on then simultaneous to all your other work.
Really, you can't do both.
And everybody thought I was going to make shitloads of money,
but I didn't think that I could become an inventor
because I knew it was very difficult.
Anyway…
Space prints? Oh, space prints. They're just…
Everything's sort of shifting.
I feel like things are really rolling.
This is Finnbarr's camper.
Finnbarr's got the sweetest stuff.
This is one of the teeniest houses. These are lovely back streets.
We're going to see all the stuff, Amy, all the stuff.
Yeah, that's a beautiful thing, isn't it?
- It's a cowboy. - He's like a space moose.
He is a space moose.
Radio transmitters and receivers for props.
I rang the electricity people one day to check my bill,
and the woman said, "That's savage usage."
[both laughing]
[Seán] Amy coming is…
It's a life-changing amount of happiness. Joy.
I'm just completely nuts about her.
She's here for nine days.
And we've been playing like two little kids round town, looking at things.
It's just marvelous. I can't quite… I mean, I do believe it, but it's…
it's real, you know.
Oh.
Mm-hmm. We're going to be inseparable. Possibly literally.
[Amy laughs]
We'll have to walk around like those three-legged people.
- That sounds fun. - Mm-hmm.
- I can do that. - I can do that.
[Amy] Seán invented the tiny house. [laughs]
I didn't tell her I lived in a hole in the ground under a tree.
[both laughing]
Strange, Amy has collections kind of similar to mine, only not as…
- I don't have as many tiny people. - …insane.
But I have my own tiny people.
- We shared pictures back and forth. - We're going, "I have that one too."
- "I have the tiny person." - "I have that tiny car."
[Amy] And I wrote in my profile that…
- What did I say? - She loves natural disasters.
I love a good natural disaster,
particularly that I was obsessed with the Yellowstone super volcano.
And that was what did it, it was the Yellowstone super volcano.
- [laughing] - Like, whoa!
I keep saying we're two little magnets drawn inevitably towards each other.
I think we're pretty compatible.
- Yes. - I think so.
You're so goddamn edible.
I'm as frazzled now as I was at the very beginning.
I was kind of fantasizing that the shed would burn down.
But I think I underestimated the difficulty of, you know, divesting.
This clutter is definitely…
related to the clutter in my mind
where, you know, I have a lot of stuff…
for 40 years hoarded.
Because a little thing is precious to me.
That's super precious to me.
I think…
I don't know what the answer is. I think…
Let's see what happens.
[percussive riffs playing]
Everything's coming back from the space. It's basically here.
[chuckling]
There's just something terrible and inevitable about it.
I'd say two thirds of what went out has come back,
but it's come back in some order.
I can actually see it and I can actually get at it.
Life as usual is not perfect.
But improvements are very welcome.
Oh, my God.
Well, there's three boxes, I think, of my dad's 8mm film.
This is the scary bit. Is that the right way? Yes, it is.
That's it.
Oh, my God. There we are.
Christ.
Oh, my God.
Wow. Oh, Jesus.
There I am.
We all look really healthy.
We look so happy in the early childhood things.
It's a long time ago. My God.
Seán and Gerard CD, 1964.
That's from tape.
Will it play?
[young Seán] ♪ We all live In a yellow submarine ♪
♪ Yellow submarine ♪
♪ And our friends are all aboard ♪
♪ Many more of them live next-door ♪
♪ And the band… ♪ [singing indistinctly]
[young Seán laughing]
I had no idea I was like that.
[mother speaking softly, indistinctly]
[young Seán speaking indistinctly]
[adult Seán] When my parents passed away…
They died in '04 and '05,
so… I didn't want to-- couldn't hear it.
But now it's super precious to me. To hear her voice is marvelous.
[woman] Did you see much of them after you left home?
Very intermittently.
I was… I stayed away very much.
If I went home for a few days, I got bored and fractious and wanted to go again.
I used to feel very guilty about it. Now I don't.
That they wanted me really to go and have my life, you know.
But my mother used to weep every time I left.
[young Seán speaking indistinctly, laughing]
I felt most guilty, actually, that I was not a success.
And that I was poor.
There's a little note there pinned up from my daddy
saying, "Here's £10."
And I was probably in my thirties.
They were sending me tenners.
You know, that they couldn't afford probably.
And I might well go buy Prosecco with it.
That's very Asperger-y, that your project is so important
and that everybody should understand that.
[birds singing]
[Seán straining]
What would that be?
More film.
I found the original tape of Seamus Heaney opening the first exhibition,
and that's an amazing thing because I didn't know whether I had it.
I remember standing beside him and going, "Oh, my Jesus."
You know, this exhibition was an enormous deal.
This was my first show in a private gallery in Dublin,
and I had eight Irelantis new originals.
We were looking for somebody to open the exhibition and nobody would do it.
Because I was so associated with the Troubles
and this was still the early '90s.
I was in a panic about it, and I don't know what it was.
I hadn't had any dealings with Heaney, but, you know, he was a hero to me
and someone from a similar background.
And I made a little book of the things and left it at his doorstep with a note
asking him if he would open the show.
He rang me the next morning and said he would.
It was an incredible coup because his star was very high.
I think he won the Nobel Prize the following year maybe.
[jazz playing]
The response was amazing. You couldn't get into the gallery.
You couldn't get up the stairs to get into the opening.
Seán Hillen and I actually share the same initials.
[audience laughing]
Which spells "Sh."
It also means something to me because
it appears in one of my favorite knock-knock jokes.
- Knock knock. - Who's there?
- Irish stew. - Irish stew who?
- Irish stew in the name of the law. - [laughs]
[Seán] I was starstruck and I barely spoke to him.
But again, it was one of the things where I thought I was kind of made again.
The SHs of this world,
those people who are born and brought up in Northern Ireland
and who are not stupid or insensitive,
those people couldn't help realizing
that they were living in two places at one time.
On the island of Ireland on the one hand, and in a British state on the other.
These photo montages embody these tensions.
The title of this exhibition, Irelantis,
isn't just a verbal trick in other words.
It's about conditions of anxiety.
Atlantis was a lost city.
Atlantis is a lost city.
And in this, it's sort of like Ireland.
Ireland is one of the few nouns that has tenses.
That was a life changing night.
And suddenly I was cool.
It was, you know, the great intellectual stamp of interesting-ness,
which mattered to me more than anything.
It mattered to me maybe more than anybody else.
And it mattered to me as well because my parents were able to come to that.
It meant that it was somehow significant to what you were doing,
you know.
I still hadn't solved the problem of making money.
[woman] And did you meet and talk to Seamus Heaney again after that?
No…
I transcribed the speech because the speech was incredibly sophisticated.
I typed it up and had it in the gallery.
Then I sent the speech to him.
And I got back a curt little note from him saying,
"Seán, how come you have this? It's not meant for publication."
And I was just completely fucking mortified.
I was just completely horrified.
I had this huge gift from him and…
I had kind of messed it up.
I had no idea that he was forever telling people off for quoting him,
because people were always quoting him.
So one of my most popular pictures is called Collecting Meteorites At Knowth.
And I got that idea from him
because he has a line in a poem, "If I could come upon meteorite."
"Instead, I walk through dank leaves, husks."
And I found in a rock shop in Dublin a meteorite the size of my fist.
And I bought it for 350 quid and I sent it to him as a gift.
And he sent me back a really beautiful letter
that has a kind of a poem in it.
It goes, "Dear Seán, you know I have this line,
'If I could come upon meteorite.'"
"The meteorite stood for steadfastness in the vocation
and now it has become solid and carries more weight than ever."
"I love the heft and blackness of the thing itself,
the thought of its galactic travels, its fiery burn."
[gasps] It's just breathtaking.
Imagine how it felt reading that, you know,
the generosity of it, again, to expound like that on the gift
is really very moving and very, very touching for me, you know?
So there was a beautiful circuit, and a kind of healing at the end of it.
[clock ticking]
Like, all of this has been delving into my own history.
It shows that I have had a career.
I have been working all this time, you know?
Sometimes you look back and it looks like a vacuum
and you wonder what the hell you were doing.
You know, Willie Yeats said
there's no point in waiting for the iron to be hot.
He said you've got to beat it until it's hot.
And I'm around this long. I know I'm good. I know I'm good.
[footsteps approaching]
- Seán. - [Seán] Hi, Greg.
- Where are you? Upstairs? - [Seán] I am, in the new empire, Greg.
[Greg] Jeez, you think I'd be used to these fucking stairs.
Don't die on them. [laughing]
That'd be embarrassing.
What do you think? I know it's--
Well, it still looks extraordinarily tidy.
- Exactly. It's incredible. - Kind of.
It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, I can do this.
Yeah.
- [Greg] I'm impressed. - Thank you.
[Greg] You've got books here now rather than…
- Just piles. - …big Tupperware containers…
- Some of the Tupperware is still here. - …with robot motors and stuff in them.
[Seán] I might have some motors left.
And where are all the Hinde postcards?
- They're all into these drawers. - Yeah.
It's exciting. I mean, it would be lovely to know what's in every single one.
On the other hand, it's always a lucky dip.
[inhales sharply] God, that's great.
I mean, we're going to find out,
but it's a hell of a lot better than it was.
Look, I printed up some images.
[Seán] Oh, my Jesus. God, that's terrifying, isn't it?
[Greg] Yeah, that's a horror story.
[Seán laughing]
[Greg] I mean, that is Radio Rental. That is just…
[Seán] The wires are mind boggling.
- So it went from that… - Yeah.
…to this.
Oh, my God.
How did you do that, Greg?
[Greg] I was so knocked out at the state of the room, like it was so naked.
[Seán] Yeah.
I kind of suspect it's going to end up going back to that.
Well, I don't think so. But you never know.
[Greg] Whereas that had to be documented.
- Naked studio. - [Seán] No, it's brilliant.
- Do you want a glass of Prosecco? - Sure. Yeah.
Cool. It's an excuse for me to have one.
Back in a moment.
[Greg] His work is already a bit bonkers.
That's probably why I can actually encourage him to strip completely naked
and photograph him here.
So I hope that this space…
Mind you, it's already looking untidy and fairly unworkable.
But I hope he clears that and actually starts working again.
[Seán] What else is new?
Some of the clouds are going to Cologne, which is exciting.
They're calling them Suspicious Clouds. I don't know what that is in German.
[Greg] As you know, I don't buy the cloud theory.
[Seán] It's okay.
Gosh, I think these are great.
The show is in a disused church tower in the middle of Cologne.
This year the theme is to do with the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
I'm thrilled to be invited. It's exciting.
And it's also very good for me and to see how the work is received.
I mean, one thing is I have no German, which is unfortunate,
so I won't know what people are saying.
[chuckles] Which might be good.
[percussive jazz playing]
[bell chimes]
[camera shutter clicking]
[light-hearted jazz playing]
[laughing]
Well, I'm off to the church, I've forgotten what it's called,
in Rutherplatz, where I hope the clouds are hanging.
To be here is good. It gives me the taste. You know, I could be showing a lot more.
[percussive riffs playing]
- Rochus! - Hey, Seán. How are you?
- It's good to see you. - Good to see you again.
It's good to be back.
This is looking exciting already.
Yes, the music got dramatic, and in came Seán Hillen.
Nice. This is from Florian.
- [Seán] It's a signed piece? - It's a signed piece of Florian.
We took a piece by Stockhausen and we cut out all the silence
and put it in here as well.
It's a good silence.
[ethereal music chiming]
How beautiful.
So this is a piece by Omar Fivefa. He will be here tonight as well.
You don't know him.
But if you lay down and watch up.
[Seán strains]
[laughing]
That's good.
It's really good.
Happy space.
Oh, wow!
Seán.
Now we have very fantastic pictures by an artist called Seán Hillen.
- [Seán laughs] - Please.
Ooh, I love the foil.
Wow.
So beautiful.
Gosh.
Ooh!
It's a bit like the deck of a starship or something.
I think I want to live here.
[chuckles]
[Rochus] Do you know what this is for me?
You have the question: Where come these clouds from?
- Yes. - This is the factory of the clouds.
[Seán laughs]
- [Rochus] On the planet. - Very good.
On Saturday, we had a lot of people. Hundreds.
Wonderful.
[Rochus] The idea of the clouds,
a lot of people ask if it's done artificially, like Photoshop.
I say, "No, it's not Photoshop, it's Seán Hillen."
[Seán] Yeah. No, I just control the clouds.
[Rochus] It's fantasy, but also reality.
[Seán] Yes, it's great.
I knew it was good to let you do what you wanted with it.
I like it very much.
[laughter, indistinct chatter]
[Seán] With this new networking attitude,
I learned that I need to engage with the world where it is,
meet people where they are.
You know, you have to…
You have to be in the world a little bit.
[percussive jazz playing]
[camera shutter clicking]
[ethereal choir vocalizing]
I love the cathedral in Cologne.
When you go into a space like that,
I can't help but be slightly overcome by it.
And finding that amazing contemporary stained glass window.
I think it's Gerhard Richter.
[camera shutter clicking]
As somebody who's kind of devoted their life to trying to make art,
it's terribly important to be reminded of how powerful it can be.
I love to encounter art that is that good.
It makes me want to make art,
which is really a wonderful thing a trip can do, you know,
to make you feel excited and inspired about doing my own.
Cutting out bits of paper. [laughs]
It's not a hundred-foot-high stained glass window, but…
[ethereal chorus continues]
[slicing paper]
[jazz riff playing]
I'm just in this mood where I'm enjoying playing.
It needs a sky, some drama in the sky or something.
I'll know it when I see it, I think.
A night sky might be fun in it.
Because it's so counterintuitive.
These Ladybird books have been my hunting grounds forever.
That might be nice.
That's kind of fun, isn't it? Kind of magicalize it up a bit.
It's a silly, cheap trick,
but using these things to mask the sides, I can unify a picture.
And this could be fun. Could end up as something nice.
Well, I have piles of work now piled up.
I mean, I'm surrounded by material. I'm playing with it all the time.
You can't fake that.
When I'm excited, the pictures are exciting.
But it's a wonderful feeling.
I don't know what's gonna come out of it, but I feel pictures are coming out of it.
Well, the difference is that everything has changed.
I got taken on by a wonderful international gallery,
a top gallery, Anna-Patricia Kahn.
And she deals at the very high end.
And this is what I've always wanted, really, is to get the work scene.
She saw my work accidentally.
Was shown it accidentally by a friend of a friend
of an agent that I've worked with.
And she's hopefully going to sell work to the National Gallery.
So that's enormous in itself.
My gosh.
Good things can actually happen when you put yourself out a bit.
It's kind of extraordinary. It's taken me a--
It's not entirely sunk in,
except that the huge weight and terror has gone.
And I feel able to sit and play with collages.
And the greatest thing is that people are going to see the work.
And people with money who might buy it are going to see the work.
And that's… [inhales sharply] …that's done a complete turnaround in life.
[sea gulls crying]
[clock ticking]
The biggest thing that happened is that Amy came here and is still here,
got kind of trapped by the COVID thing.
We've been just having a shamefully great time during the lockdown.
And I've--
I have a little garden she's seen for the first time,
and Amy's growing some vegetables from seeds.
It's a huge change in affairs.
We adore each other, you know. We're crazy, we're like two kids.
My sweetheart.
You know, playing or going on adventures and then making pictures. [chuckles]
I'm very moved about it because I'm so happy and…
you know, I feel unstoppable again.
I'm going to go and make you another coffee, darling, at some point.
Oh, boy. That's good.
[percussive jazz playing]