Paul Seawright The Forest

In Northern Ireland the forest was convenient ≠ the edge of Belfast and Derry are surrounded by hills, mountains, countless acres of countryside and woodland that are unpopulated and unpoliced. Slipping away from the streetlights of the city you are plunged unmercifully into blackness. This place ≠ somewhere between the urban and the rural, between darkness and light is a no-mans land. It isn't politicised like the wasteground between Protestant and Catholic housing estates in Belfast where I have worked before ≠ but it is an equally tense space, unoccupied, silent and unfamiliar. The edges of forests, woods and expansive fields are tantalisingly mapped by the orange glow of the last light from the city. It is a paradoxical site ≠ a fearful yet beautiful landscape that implies a malevolence somewhere between the real and the imagined.

Certainly the Irish have no monopoly on violence... In 1997 police found body parts, dumped in bin bags in a lay-by outside Newport, South Wales where I now live.... The lay-by, pressed tightly between the road and the forest, is a location that gives form to the tension between city and county, a place that French roadsigns ironically call refuge.The dark presence of Epping Forest looms just outside the East End of London and is mythologized as a place where criminals conclude violent acts. It is a place transformed by the onset of darkness when it assumes a foreboding presence on the edge of the capital. Its darkness reaches far beyond the phosphorescent lights that stray into its borders from the suburban towns and roads that trace its path north, roads themselves that eventually give way to darkness. It is around the edges of Epping Forest, lay-bys throughout Britain and Ireland and woods that skirt the periphery of our cities that I am making these photographs at night.

Paul Seawright Hasselblad Museum Exhibition Notes January 2000