In the spring of 2018 I was asked if I would like to be one of 10 artist based in Belfast to create some work to mark 20 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. The question we were all asked was, what might an artist create that could ever contain the complexity, horror, and sorrow of over 3600 lives lost from the armed conflict in Northern Ireland? The work that resulted was powerful and varied.

After a few false starts due to time limitations and logistical issues I decided to engage with my own community, the community of Redeemer Central on Donegall Street. Donegall street is a historically an important arterial route into the city of Belfast but in recent years it has become famous for parades and protests around liberty and rights. At the center of this storm is St Patricks catholic church which in July of 2015 became a viral hit on you tube. Protests and counter protests followed and some years later Donegall street is still an interface and a spotlight for attention.

Being part of the community at Redeemer Central gave me the opportunity to look a little closer at the physicality of difference. What makes one tradition, Redeemer Central in a building at 101 Donegall Street, different to any other tradition, St Patricks in a building at 199 Donegall Street. Two buildings and two separate communities just over 100 meters apart. If we take time to examine how the spaces we inhabit are shaped by us and what we do, we begin to ask do we shape these spaces or do they shape us? The work that resulted looks at the surfaces of the vernacular, and the marks left by years of liturgy and observance. But possibly more interesting is what meanings and emotions we attach to these objects. For this reason I decided to exhibit a series of the images from St Patricks church in Redeemer Central and a series of images from Redeemer Central in St Patricks Church. Do these familiar objects still tell the same stories when they are presented in another location. Is a photograph of an icon still an icon ? These are the questions this exhibition hopes to ask.

Antoni Gaudí the troubled architect who designed the La Sagrada Família the beautiful and bazaar cathedral in Barcelona, famously said “Creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create...he discovers.” I’ve discovered a lot of things through this project, some of the things I’ve discovered have made their way into these photographs, but mostly I’ve just discovered.

Stephen Wilson

Press Release

Same Difference: Photograph Exhibition

Exhibited 6-12 June 2019 at Redeemer Central (101 Donegall Street) & St.Patricks (199 Donegall Street)

An exhibition of photographs exploring similarities and differences by people who share one street in the historic heart of Belfast.

Stephen Wilson has photographed war in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this exhibition, two of Donegall Street’s oldest buildings, both bearing the scars of world war and civil conflict, are the setting for pictures that reflect on them and the communities for whom they are sacred.

Donegall Street has been viewed as a contested space for much of its history but is now a centre of regeneration.

This exhibition marks the centenary of “Madonna of the Lakes,” Sir John Lavery’s gift to St Patrick’s Pre-Cathedral in 1919. Donated to honour the church of his Baptism, the tryptch was part of a sequence of paintings done by him at the suggestion of Lady Lavery, to “join together all the contending elements of (his) native city”. Sir John was scrupulous in painting pairs – Carson and Redmond, Catholic and Anglican Primates, the Grand Master of the Orange Lodge and Joe Devlin MP, Bishop MacRory and Bishop Grierson.

In this exhibition we explore two traditions that to the outsider seem remarkable similar but to each other are fundamentally different. What are these differences? Are they visible to untrained eyes? To reframe and represent the familiar in an unfamiliar setting, this exhibition shows photographs of a Catholic Church building in Protestant Church and vice versa and asks: do we see what is there even when it is somewhere else?

We invest material things with emotion and they become icons. St Patrick’s holds Lavery’s gift in trust for the city of Belfast. We feel that it deserves more than a static memorial: and that its true legacy is to be an inspiration for creativity in the city we share and a homage to the humane role of beauty as Belfast transforms itself.

In images of light and shade in and the words they provoke you are welcome to take part in the conversation about the differences of tradition that make us ourselves and the similarities that we share.