Works °18 — DERMOT SEYMOUR

interview by Liam Kelly

ISBN 978 0946641 482     32 pages (paperback)    20x15cm     17 illus

Dermot Seymour may paint in a realist style, but his finished works are anything but, filled as they are with bizarre juxtapositions and a sense of displacement. Their ominous mood may arise from their being largely about the situation in Northern Ireland, its troubles and insecurities. Here Seymour talks about the motivations behind his paintings and series of works, his use of anecdote and history, and his convoluted titling. Excellent colour reproductions will keep the reader searching for answers.

EXTRACT

"I had seen an exhibition of Irish Army vehicles, including the one in which Michael Collins was driving when ambushed, and it brought back a memory from years before. Going home on the bus late at night from Belfast, this girl got on and she was drunk. She came and sat beside me and she told me her name was Anne-Marie Mulvenna and she came from Ardoyne. And she said, ‘Do you know what I used to do? I used to dream I was Michael Collins.’ So the conversation went on. The Ardoyne is a little Catholic enclave, totally surrounded by loyalist ghettos, which has suffered an awful lot. Hence the concrete surround, the graffiti, and her naked vulnerability...
          Being a Protestant, for me, is like having no head, in the sense that you are not allowed to think. It is hard to hold an individual thought about anything – whether it be in the immediate family circle or the community, or in the North in general – without becoming a threat, or a Lundy, and it could be something as trivial as listening to rock music. And I did a whole series of these paintings to emphasise what it is like. Out of that inability to think comes a lot of the bizarre, extreme behaviour, like the Shankill Butchers; out of frustration and ignorance comes crazy actions. Basically, you are talking about a world of inferiority complex – almost a pride in being ignorant."

— Dermot Seymour in conversation