LIGHTHOUSE Donovan Wylie 
19 Jun – 14 Sep 2025 

Lighthouse represents things near and far away, the camera crossing channels that flicker between barriers and invitations. Following the June 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, Donovan Wylie began to photograph distant lighthouses on key procedural dates. Glimpsed from the opposing coastlines of France, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain, the afterglow of the distant lighthouses became a way to process the tensions and complexities of identity and insularity, loneliness and love. The limited edition book Lighthouse, is published in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.  

Also on display is a rare portfolio edition of Wylie's 32 Counties: Photographs of Ireland (Secker & Warburg, 1989), a gift to the Seamus Heaney Centre, alongside a selection of correspondence and ephemera from the time of publication. Wylie’s first book at the age of 17 is a highly personal and emotionally charged examination through photography of the people of Ireland. Each county is also represented by a piece of new writing commissioned specially by an Irish writer, including Seamus Heaney for County Derry. Text and photographs work to create a variety of moods that reflect a proud, beleaguered, passionate country and the men, women and children that give it heart.   

This exhibition marks the Seamus Heaney Centre’s first year in their new building, a move that has allowed us to display materials from our collections for the first time. It marks the significance of these two bodies of work bookending a practice, and moments stretching somewhere between them of ‘becoming’ an artist. 

Donovan Wylie (b. 1971) is an artist based in his native Belfast. Exploring alternative strategies for the representation of conflict, Wylie combines conceptual and typological approaches, and asks us to reflect on complexities of human experience within the contexts of perception, history and landscape. 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 Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Wylie’s books include 32 Counties (Secker & Warburg 1989), Maze (2009 Granta/Steidl), Scrapbook (2009 AMC/Steidl), The Towers Series (2007 – 2014 Steidl), A Good and Spacious Land (2017 Yale University Art Gallery).