NOTE: This page is not at all up-to-date.
Please see seanhillen.com news for lots more news, press, information, for instance a collection of Sean Hillen works on book-covers.

You can read Fintan O'Toole's 1999 introductory text to the Irelantis book here and his 2011 article here (pdf)

most below have links to the full article:

an online article on Seán's work at the site of RTÉ Television


"brilliantly reinvents John Hinde's landscapes of Ireland into scenes from a place called Irelantis. 'The scalpel is a shovel and the slicing of postcards like cutting turf', he says."
Rosita Boland, The Irish Times, 9th Oct, 1999


"Hillen's images stretch the mind and imagination of the viewer"
Review by Conn O'Donovan; CIRCA magazine Spring 2000


"Hillen's vision is heroic, and there is nothing snide in his flights of fancy."
Review by Kya de Longchamps; The Examiner November 1999


"Even in this early work, rooted in the grubby and mundane, there is something transcendent about Sean Hillen's vision."
Cut & Paste- a History of Photomontage


"Throughout the twentieth century, photomontage has had the potential to tear apart the world, revealing what is hidden, and to construct new and impossible visions.."
review by Stephen Bull from Creative Camera magazine
of 'IRELANTIS' and Peter Kennard's 'Domesday Book'

"Braving pounding house beats and rails of kinetic nylon danceware Kieron Owens recently met with Sean Hillen, creator of Irelantis and master of his own destiny..."
interview with Kieron Owens from Dublin Event Guide 1997


"Irelantis is a psychoactive tourist idyll, with citizens strolling past sunlit wonders"
Mic Moroney on Seán Hillen and his work at the Hales Gallery, London,
The Guardian, 21st Dec, 1999


"there's more in Seán's head, as I said, than a gun would take out..."
BBC Northern Ireland, 'Your Place & Mine' (1994)


"it's disturbing, funny, irreverent, and it is very good indeed"
BBC Northern Ireland, 'The Sean Rafferty Show' (1996)


"Irelantis is, I think, the Ireland manufactured from equal parts of sacred presence and fit-up hucksterism... certainly one of the wryest and most humane respondents to the psychological clutter of modern, MTV Ireland"
John M Farrell, CIRCA Magazine (Summer 1996)


"a mystical invocation of imagination anyhow, and something kind of plausible too.."Irelantis review by Catherine Duncan from SOURCE Magazine issue 09


"This was one book review I was looking forward to..."
review by Gavin Murphy from SOURCE Magazine issue 21

"Seán Hillen works with photomontage, a deceptively modest medium. Popular with primary school teachers as a cheap and easy craft activity, it has also proved itself capable of registering some of the major cultural and political crises of the twentieth century."
essay on Seán's early montage work by Heartfield expert David Evans (1993)


"It is at once spectacular and comical - in fact so overblown that one willingly participates in its wild flight of fancy."
Irelantis book review by Gavin Murphy, SOURCE magazine, 2000


"Hillen's unique perspective on the world makes you smile and look
again. There is always something more, something that slips in and lingers
until you realise there is no one pattern to perception but many."
Global Doras

"It puts the past, the present, the future, the nowhere, at our finger-tips and reflects how we and our world are changing. The collection is funny. It is thoughtful. It is £19.95. But it is also unique and ­ if you are prepared to think about it ­ thought provoking."
Steven McCaffery, the Irish News, 25th Oct, 1999


"Enigmatic ... a recreated reality ... places Ireland at the centre of the Universe, if only to show that the universe isn't too big and we're all closer than we think."
Irish News


"Bigger than anything the Department of Arts and Culture could invent..."
Medb Ruane, Sunday Times 1996


"Seán Hillen's art is born out of an awareness of division and a desire for wholeness; but Hillen is also aware that we live in a world where the comfort of wholeness is denied, so his work balances nicely between irony and ache."
Seamus Heaney

"a genuinely original mind... irresistibly funny."
Sarah Kent, Time Out

"The image-maker most likely to turn us on to glue and paste..."
Luke Clancy, Critics Choice '97, The Irish Times