Willie Doherty emerged as one of the great exponents of video art in the 1990s. From the very first works, there was a relationship between the subject matter of each video and the intrinsic nature of the medium itself. Amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it was video that was used to persistently document violent incidents and to present them to the population on the news every day. Doherty’s works frequently echoes those news images – long shots on apparently innocuous stretches of rural roads where bodies may have been found, overviews of seemingly quiet housing estates where riots had occurred. Most of these scenes on the news were after the event and taught a generation of viewers to imbue relatively innocent landscape images with portents of evil, imagined brutalities and intimidating threats. Doherty’s work re-examines these landscapes. Increasingly in his more recent works, it is the power of memory that occupies him. The Troubles may have wound down, but the familiar, threatening landscapes still haunt a generation. Doherty succeeds not only in exploring the local trauma of Northern Ireland in these pieces, but in universalising it. At times, the grammar of horror films echoes in his work, helping to translate the local by means of a common cinematic language. More often though, it is his acute knowledge of how images can dominate human memory that helps the work transcend local concerns. In Ghost Story, Doherty works with Seamus McGarvey, a cinematographer best known for work on films such as The Hours, High Fidelity, Enigma, Atonement and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The collaboration with McGarvey, who is also from Northern Ireland, brings another dimension to Doherty’s work. With such a cinematographer, Doherty can heighten the surface of his films to create images that have the dreamlike intensity of a persistent memory. As in many of his works, there is a process of internalisation – the voiceover, the gliding eye of the camera, the surreal appearance of figures in the landscape all feel more like dreamwork or the traumatic experience of a repetitive memory. Together McGarvey and Doherty fashion a filmic surface that is seductive and disturbing. Doherty has spoken of how he works with what can be created at a particular moment in a specific location with his camera crew. The shared sensibility of the artist and the cinematographer ensure that this process is not random. Their awareness of how landscape can be read on many levels, and how the seemingly everyday can be invested with unease, informs how they create images.