Holes In Heaven

Seán Hillen​

The sky has long been a subject for artists as well as probably always having been the subject of curiosity and attention. Clouds have also always been a metaphor for doubt. Perhaps that is why when artist Seán Hillen turned his attention and his lens to the clouds, what he found there and photographed, whilst beautiful, is to him still enigmatic, mystifying and slightly disturbing.

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The images chosen seem to fall into a few different genres. There are some, he points out, that look strangely like glyphs of animals or characters in a lost alphabet.

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Some appear in forms which echo birds and even aeroplanes, and occasionally they seem spread across the sky in a mirror-image of a sprawling airport. One recurring feature Hillen claims seems unlikely to be natural is where a filament of cloud forms a loop or a complicated zig-zagging pattern. Then there are the clouds that began his interest- “rectangular clouds” he has labelled them, and these do seem to defy in particular the rounded puffy cumulus clouds.

In some cases a distant and oblique view of a bank of cloud shows strangely sharp and right-angled cornered sections apparently taken from its underside as neatly as if with a surgeon’s knife.

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Link to Seán Hillen's online gallery of approximately 400 images from Holes in Heaven:  www.rectangularclouds.com

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