Northern star

PAUL Seawright seemed equally delighted and surprised on the announcement of his victory in the IMMA/Glen Dimplex Artists Award last Monday night. The Belfast photographer had every right to be surprised: those seated around the grand, round tables in the banquet hall at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham awaiting the result would be forgiven for thinking the £15,000 award was going elsewhere.

When the shortlist for the award was announced last December, Cork-born sculptor Dorothy Cross seemed something of a certainty. She had previously been shortlisted for the prize, losing out in 1995 to Willie Doherty, another Northern Irish photographer. This year it seemed, on the back of a supremely confident mini-retrospective at Sligo's Model Arts Centre, the prize would have to be given to Cross. But despite this, and her status as the bookies' favourite, when the chairman of the Arts Council, Ciaran Benson, announced the award Cross was passed over once more.

The images in Seawright's current display, part of the IMMA/ Glen Dimplex Award show at the museum, are photographic prints, mounted on aluminium, fabricated as close to life-size as is possible within the limits of the metal. "It gets kind of wobbly if you go much bigger, but it ought to be life-size so you can feel as though you are standing in that space," Seawright says.

He has clearly been quizzed in the past about the resemblance of his work to that of previous winner Willie Doherty, who hails from Derry. Both use large, full colour images mounted on metal, which hang on the gallery wall-to emphasise their status as objects; both often feature objects and land-marks that are rusted, crumbling, abandoned, misused, burnt out.

Given, as Seawright says, that "the landscape becomes a perfect allegory for the situation" in the North of Ireland, perhaps it should not be surprising two artists tread such similar territory. "I think, ironically, there is very little relationship with Willie," Seawright says. "There is a very standard way of presenting work like that."

"Because I went away to study in England, I think I was much more influenced by people like Graham, who began to work in Northern Ireland at about the same time Willie was making his first black and white pieces.

"I think much of Willie's work is about representation and language. I don't think my work is necessarily about that. Mine is more about repositioning the way we construct meaning in relation to a political situation like Northern Ireland. I am interested in how art, particularly photography, makes invisible subjects visible."

Seawright, who describes himself as coming from a working-class Protestant housing estate in North Belfast, says he might easily have entered politics in some way if he had not become an artist. He took A-Levels in English, Politics and History before going to art school and, after he moved to Wales three years ago, became a member of the British Labour Party - "something I was not allowed to do in Northern Ireland".

"I was attracted to that more accommodating ethos of socialism which has never really been grasped in Northern Ireland because history hasn't allowed it to happen because all politics in Northern Ireland are de facto right wing..."

Seawright's earlier photographic shows centred on sectarian murders and the Orange Order. In the first of these groups of works, the sites of early murders in the Troubles are photographed in colour with odd, quirky perspectives and labelled with a brief, almost documentary description of a murder, which the viewer may relate to site featured.

For his next series, Seawright went into his own upbringing. "The Orange Order work was very, very subjective," he says. "I wanted to make work about Protestant culture, I wanted to dig into my own psyche, my own family, my own past. But if you look at that work it's quite negative about the Orange Order. It's about power, it's about cultural dominance ... but there are photographs in there that are about a unique culture. There was a paradox there. It's as though I was saying: `Here's my heritage, here's my background, but there's things in it that I find very difficult'."

To make this next body of work, "Police Force", Seawright was given unlimited access to the secret, mostly unseen spaces in which RUC officers pass their working lives. Behind the metal grills and bullet-proof windows, we see desperate spaces, matched only in their harshness by bleak detention cells.

"When I started that work, I didn't quite know what I was going to get. Then these spaces really just blew me away. Northern Ireland has (proportionally) the most expensive police force in the world. And so you have a vision - I certainly had - of a very slick, high-tech environment. It's the antithesis of that. It's a very, very institutionalised, dilapidated, depressing environment. I mean, there were sheds people spend 16-hour shifts in nicotine-stained, painted black so snipers can't pick out their silhouettes against walls."

The suggestion of the images in "Police Force" seems to be that, even if the force is perceived as being used to assert unionist power, the effect of the security situation is to trap both communities in undesirable architectural and by extension, psychological space. These photographs seem to offer a highly sympathetic view of the RUC and its officers as victims of power being exerted elsewhere. This makes Seawright's work complex and unconventional, since it is rare to find an artist in many ways aligning him or herself with a police force.

SUCH an interpretation might easily be challenged by Seawright (as it was on Monday night), as the result of approaching the work with a certain set of cultural baggage. He has, he says, worked against "closure" in his images. "When the work was reviewed abroad, there was a belief that the work had a much broader currency than just Northern Ireland, that it could have been made in Berlin, it could have been made in the States. A lot of the meaning is constructed within the image as people look at it. A lot happens right there."

The availability of a range of different interpretations of his work, which is of prime importance to Seawright has, he says, led to some interesting situations. One of the photographer's better-known images features a photograph of the back of the head of an RUC officer wearing a radio ear-piece. "One reviewer wrote about it as this beetle-like creature burrowing into the man's ear, saying the image was about the darkness of surveillance, and about how it was an oppressive, dark image," he says. "When I read that I just had to laugh because the RUC had been on to me to see if they could use the image for the cover of their Police Beat magazine - because for them the image was about the discomfort of a policeman having to wear that device. It's a whole other culture..."