Lighthouse, will celebrate the new photography series by Donovan Wylie with the launch of a limited edition photobook, produced in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's.  

The exhibition will include a portfolio edition of Wylie's 32 Counties: Photographs of Ireland (Secker & Warburg, 1989) with ephemera from the time of publication, alongside prints towards the new book and a print from the new Lighthouse series. 

The launch event will mark the Seamus Heaney Centre’s first anniversary in their new building. The event also celebrates the generous donation to the Centre's archives of a print from the new Lighthouse series, and a rare portfolio edition of 32 Counties: Photographs of Ireland, by Donovan Wylie (Secker & Warburg, 1989) featuring texts by Irish writers including Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian. 

Donovan Wylie will be joined in conversation by SHC Director Glenn Patterson to discuss making books, ‘becoming’ an artist, and the significance of these two bodies of work bookending Wylie’s expansive practice. 

The exhibition continues until Sun 14 Sep 2025. 

Donovan Wylie (b. 1971) is an artist based in his native Belfast, Northern Ireland. Exploring alternative strategies for the representation of conflict, Wylie combines conceptual and typological approaches, and asks us to reflect on complexities of human expereince 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). 

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. 

32 Counties: Photographs of Ireland was published in 1989 by Secker & Warburg. 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 appropriate Irish writer. 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.