In September of 2011, Nick Stewart spent a week driving along and across the Irish border. At each crossing, he recorded factual details of the landscape. Screen-grabs of the places he visited taken from Google Maps are presented in this project, as much for their aesthetic qualities as for any relation to the artist’s actual experience of those sites.

The book’s title refers to the peculiar relation of geography to politics in Ireland. ‘North’ both indicates a direction and a national identity: the North. The same is true of ‘South’.

Nick Stewart was born and brought up on the north coast of Northern Ireland. The contrast between the beauty of the landscape of his birth place and the traumatising reality of its religious and political divisions remain a formative perception of the place that still informs his art today.