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Through photographing singular lighthouses as seen from the opposing coastlines of France and the home nations of the United Kingdom, Belfast-based artist Donovan Wylie confronts the physical barriers and invitations to crossing created by the sea. Immediately following the June 2016 referendum, Wylie began exploring ideas of family dynamics and fractured relationships as a way to understand the United Kingdom´s current state. In collaboration with the writer Chris Klatell and the Seamus Heaney Centre, this project responds to Virginia Woolf´s To the Lighthouse (1927), which investigates the complexities of seeing, loss and the passage of time. By photographing the afterglow of distant lighthouses to process the tensions and complexities of identity and isolationism, Lighthouse simultaneously represents closeness and distance, interrogating how the isolation of the British landscape contributes to understanding our national identity.

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Wylie, Donovan
Born in 1971, Donovan Wylie is a photographer and filmmaker based in his native Belfast. Exploring alternative strategies for the representation of conflict, Wylie combines conceptual and typological approaches, and asks us to consider the role of photography within the contexts of preservation, memory and history. Wylie is Professor of Photography at Ulster University, and his work is held in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Wylie´s books with Steidl include Maze (2009), Outposts (2011), North Warning System (2014) and Housing Plans for the Future (2018).

Klatell, Chris
Chris Klatell is a writer and lawyer based in New York. He writes frequently about photography, including recent collaborations with Donovan Wylie (A Good and Spacious Land, 2017), Jim Goldberg (Candy, 2017), Gilles Peress (Annals of the North, 2019) and Zoe Strauss (Commencement, 2019).

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