Sean Hillen is an Irish artist who’s work makes use of the photo-montage method in order to merge images together, showing the contrast between 2 contrasting scenarios that are linked together in a more figurative sense. Hillens work often approaches topics such as violence, politics, literature and history. After growing up in unison with the conflict in Northern Ireland, Hillen learned to appreciate the different meanings that could be portrayed by merging images together, to create an image that drew the eye of the viewer due to the colours and lack of context, but with closer inspection conveys a meaning of some description. Often, Hillens work contains meanings that are personal to him, and some of his work is created with aesthetic as a priority, rather than a meaning or reason.
“When you take a photograph, you take a whole world, a cosmos, with you. And then when you collide it with something else you have a whole new level of meaning, entering, penetrating, sliding against one another.” – Hillen
As my second photo-shoot involves merging contrasting images together to represent a subject being on an incorrect path (where the environment doesn’t match what the subject represents) I have focused my case study on Hillen.
Hillen uses photo-montage to create landscape images in which parts of the landscape completely contrast other sections, emphasizing a split between 2 wolds which have been forcibly merged together. Hillen’s work uses images from different settings and locations and merges them with their complete opposites, creating 1 single image in which the scene looks naturally and organically merged, but the context of the image is twisted or wrong.
Examples of Hillen’s work can be seen below:
The contrast between the images Hillen uses in each piece of work is clear, and the use of bold colour and shapes allows for the images to clearly outline where the images physically come together, although they fit together smoothly.
I will be taking inspiration from Hillens work in order to produce my second photo-shoot, in which I will take an image of a a subject representing a certain career/lifestyle (e.g a suit to represent an office worker), and I will use a photo-montage technique to insert the subject into an environment that does not match the context of their background (e.g an office worker in a forest) to place emphasis on the theme of being on the wrong path/journey. I will be taking inspiration from Hillens out of context imagery, and the idea of merging 2 images together to create a more visual than figurative meaning.