Steidlville

Donovan Wylie, Book Signing at Steidlville London

We are very pleased to announce a book signing and reception for British Watchtowers, Scrapbook and Maze by Donovan Wylie.

Steidlville London, 36 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3LJ
3.30-5.30pm Saturday 27th of June, 2009

British Watchtowers

Observation, whether by the human eye, or the technical eye of a surveillance camera, requires an architectural structure that elevates the viewer into a position of command. The system of Iron Age hill forts, built across Britain from around 500 BC, used natural promontories to survey the surrounding landscape. Two thousand years later, the British army used a similar system of watchtowers to survey the territories of Northern Ireland, and to observe the actions of the local people under their occupation.
These high tech towers, constructed in the mid 1980’s, primarily in the mountainous border region of South Armagh, were landmarks in a thirty year conflict in and over Northern Ireland, euphemistically called “The Troubles”.
For over a year Donovan Wylie photographed these towers. Working entirely from an elevated position, enabled by military helicopter, he created a systematic survey of the towers, their positions and perspectives within the landscape.

Scrapbook
This has been made all for the love of scrapbooks. For about three centuries in many different countries, a scrapbook or album became the most immediate manner of diary making. In Ireland, this often took on a particular and idiosyncratic form. From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, the turmoil of Northern Ireland was often reflected in these hand-constructed books. Clippings from newspapers, family photos and personal mementos often found their way into highly individual collaged records of daily life. Donovan Wylie and Timothy Prus have recreated a non-sectarian version with the benefit of hindsight. Wylie, son of a mixed marriage, grew up in Belfast during a period when identification with one side of the sectarian divide or another was an essential component of everyday life. Scrapbook gives nothing but the authors’ personal view of an era and a kind of record making.

Maze
Between 2002 and 2003 Donovan Wylie spent almost a hundred days photographing inside the Maze prison. Through its history of protests, hunger strikes and escapes, this prison, holding both republican and loyalist prisoners, became synonymous with the Northern Ireland conflict. After the Belfast peace agreement in 1998, inmates were gradually released, but the Maze remained open.
Wylie was then the only photographer granted official and unlimited access to the site, when the demolition of the prison began, symbolizing the end of the conflict in 2007. He systematically recorded its demise. The photographs which document this period are divided into four sections, each depicting a “layer” of the prison: the internal walls, the various modes of fencing, the H-blocks and, finally, the perimeter walls, which reveal the external landscape. Eventually this once-enclosed space is reintegrated with the outside world.
First published in 2004 to critical acclaim, this new edition of Maze comes in three volumes: Maze 2002/03, Maze 2007/08, and The Architecture of Containment.