Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the significance of Sean Hillen's collage series Irelantis depicting Ireland as a Diasporic agent and as a place constructed for and seen by outsiders during the years following the Republic of Ireland Act of 1949, and the Celtic Tiger period of the mid to late 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

The thirty-five collages that make up Irelantis, 1994-1999, consist of images that Dublin-based artist Sean Hillen selected mainly from two sources of tourist postcards - those featuring Ireland that British photographer John Hinde made during the mid twentieth century, and in a lesser amount, postcards showing noteworthy cultural and natural sites of Europe and North America, respectively. Hillen combined them to depict Ireland as a series of small landscape and seascape scenes that remind us of a tradition of visually representing the nation as an island to signify its Irishness and extol its topography as an archive of its histories and mythologies. I explore the significance of Hillen's collage series figuring Ireland as a Diasporic agent and as a place constructed for and seen by outsiders, namely, migrants and former émigrés, during the years following the Republic of Ireland Act of 1949, and the Celtic Tiger period of the mid to late 1990s.