Northern exposure: an artist in the Troubles

David Seymour’s paintings reflect the confusion of conflict, when the abnormal is the norm, says Tina O’Sullivan

Artist’s Dermot Seymour’s exhibition Fish, Flesh and Fowl is work painted from the early 1980s to the present. It’s at the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen, this month and next as part of a tour that began in 2011 in The Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, and is curated by Jim Smyth, but has been modified to suit each venue.

Dermot Seymour was born in Belfast in 1956 and studied at the University of Ulster. Much of his work contains imagery of the Northern Ireland conflict.

“I was part of a whole group of artists from the North who confronted this stuff in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Mr Seymour. “We just got on with it. We worked in all kinds of different styles, but we were all working with what we knew — which was coming out of the same sort of world. This work was all shown in a rarefied atmosphere of arts centres and arts museums, particularly down in the South, where most of us showed our work. It never really caused any controversy, because people who would be offended by these things don’t really go to art galleries.”

The exhibition catalogue features essays by Dermot Healy, Séamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Jamshid MirFenderesky and Jim Smyth. But Mr Seymour does not align his work with poetry. “A lot of my influences would be in the visual arts and not in poetry at all,” he says. “I read poetry now and again, and a couple of my friends are poets, but I wouldn’t say I was a poets’ painter or anything like that. My influences are Andy Warhol and Rembrant, pop art and comic-book art. Influences from all over, coming in from every angle, but they’d all be visual.”

There is a busy narrative in Mr Seymour’s work that encourages analysis of imagery. He modestly says he paints what he sees, and complex meanings are a result of environment. “It’s an iconography that you develop over the years,” Mr Seymour says. “Just circumstance — living in the North, everything seems like a symbol, but it’s not really, it’s just what you grow up with in everyday life. When I grew up, helicopters were in the sky, the same as the sun or the moon is in the sky. You’re not trying to say anything, they’re just always there. Everything I took for normality was absolutely abnormal, but you’re only aware of that when you leave the place and realise that all the things you take for granted, as part of day-to-day life, are anything but. It’s totally abnormal and absurd. That’s where the imagery comes out of.”

Mr Seymour now lives in Mayo, and his subject matter has strayed into the rural hillsides to his pastime of fishing, but his striking style of painting remains the same.

“What it comes from is a way of handling the absurdity and the darkness of the world that I grew up in,” he says. “If you try to be painterly or expressive about the absurd, it doesn’t come across. If you found a dead body, you can’t really sit down with an easel to paint, and be painterly about it. You have to detach yourself from it, and it’s that detachment from the circumstances you’re in that gives a kind of horror and absurdity, and an unreality based in complete and utter total reality. The way I work evolves, it’s a way of detaching myself from what was all around me and that becomes the way I look and see things. I carried that way of working all through my life, where I always tried to detach myself from the obvious, to make the obvious more obvious.”

While Mr Seymour no longer spends much time in Northern Ireland, the paramilitary activity there still informs his work. While EU agricultural quotas were a topic prominent in Mayo in the 1990s, rumblings north of the border mean that his more recent work features references to the Troubles once again. “In many ways, it went right back to where it started. A lot of the more recent paintings would have references to the North, with the re-emergence of low-level conflict up there. You would have banners and flags beginning to infiltrate the work again. You contemplate, and think about, where you come from. That dissidence hasn’t gone away, it’s still simmering up there and breaks out from time to time with this activity, sectarian flare-ups and things. It keeps filtering back in again,” he says.

Fish, Flesh and Fowl runs in the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen until Sept 22.