Encounter the early embers of public art in Belfast. Enjoy unravelling the students’ ambiguous actions in a city usually marred by violence.
Senior Lecturer Alastair MacLennan leads his first year students out of their studios in the Ulster Polytechnic to experiment with art in a wasteland on Nelson Street. During the early 19th century this area was known as Point Fields, Gaffikin described it as ‘a great stretch of waste ground often the scene of man fights, cock fights, dog fights and bull baiting. It was in fact the People’s Park of that day’. Artist and lecturer Tony Hill is the invisible eye behind the camera.
Tony Hill was born in 1949. He was brought up in Yorkshire, near to Huddersfield, and has lived and worked in Northern Ireland since 1975 when he was appointed as Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Art and Design at the Ulster Polytechnic (later renamed the University of Ulster) at Belfast until retiring in 2012. He has held several one-person exhibitions of installations, sculpture, drawings, photographs and films and his work has been included in numerous group and thematic shows in Ireland and abroad. He is represented by the Fenderesky Gallery, where has shown regularly since the gallery formed in 1984. You can watch more of Tony Hill’s experimental films made during the mid-70s on the BFI player.