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| Rita Duffy Console : 2006, oil on linen, 76 x 76 cm ;courtesy Millennium Court Arts Centre. |
This is the second exhibition and publication in a two-part series of new work commissioned by the Millennium Court, under the general banner 'Interrogating Contested Spaces', and involving the collaboration of major Northern Irish visual and verbal artists.
Portadown figures explicitly in the essay of County Armagh-born writer Paul Muldoon. Rita Duffy's graphics are both domestic (napkins, tablecloths, chests of drawers) and institutional (the garments of priests and lawyers). Both artists are concerned with the flax-growing and linen producing history of Northern Ireland, but their treatment of 'flax' as skin, as badge, as uniform and camouflage brings the material politically right up to date.
Yeats' poem of 1939, Cuchulain comforted , of course, casts its shadow over the exhibition. One amongst a group which includes A Needle's eye and Veronica's napkin , in which he uses textile metaphors.
One could use the Yeats poem as a checklist for the elements within the show. The "six mortal wounds," the "violent and famous," the "certain shrouds" talking amongst themselves, the "meditation on wounds and blood," the "letting fall of a bundle of linen" by a shroud "that seemed to have authority," all these images would find corollaries in the show. But such a conceit would oblige us to ask who the convicted cowards are within the exhibition and who has been driven from home and left to die in fear?
For Yeats, the needle's eye is the space through which all that is has roared and coursed and through which the thing unborn will come. The needle's eye has agency. It is time, it goads the stream on; a kind if black hole into which all things collapse and from which all things are spewed out.
The mythic character that presides over this exhibition is not ultimately Cuchulain, but rather Elision, the god of suture. The sacred shroud of Elision is shown in the painting of a parka, Relic (2001), the raw red stumps and cavities showing where the heart and hands have been ripped out and off. Relic and reliquary, this vestment is an empty shell holding the shape of its previous incumbent. Equally empty and postured are the Police jacket (2002), the lego-clerical garments of the Justus series (2006), the scarlet surplice of Mantle (2006) and the flak jacket of Flak (2006). All of them contested spaces, hollowed out, abandoned, disgraced, impotent, posturing, saturated with blood. Who will occupy them now? Where have the lawyer, cleric, paramilitary, soldier, policeman gone? Do they occupy each other's clothes, or other kinds of suits? Do they have a role at all?
The controlling trope of the show is embodied in Elision (2003): a white linen shirt, into which all the other vestments are metaphorically collapsed, which holds the shape of the elided or excised torso, and which floats in the centre of thelinen 'canvas'. The extreme background is a mottled camouflage field. Floating between these two grounds is an array of skeletal drawings of armaments.
In the writing, portmanteau words stitch concepts together. Muldoon the child wants to know where the chocolate Quakers are, rather than the cambric Quakers: "where were the chocolutherans, the chocatholics?" Time is elided in the coincidence of his father'sreturn to start flax-cropping in the year of publication of Cuchulain comforted . A fluttering handkerchief the suture that elides the linen barons of his infancy and Father Edward Daly as he walks through the dead and dying of Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Space is elided in the compacting of the white room in which he was born, a very modern hospital at the time, and the room in which he now re-imagines himself: this spanking new white room of the exhibition.
Sutured by frame, the text Folding a napkin.Straightening the tablecloth.No washing of dirty linen in public. No flags or emblems is printed on the wall below the painting Console (2006), a wooden hostess trolley, one wing out, covered by a white linen tablecloth. It is the table of intimate meals, the gurney of the body laid to rest, the altar of worship, the shroud and the magician's table of transformation. Sutured by gutter, in Cloth , the same four lines sit on the left-hand page opposite the painting Objection (2006), the floating, empty robes and wig of a barrister, right hand raised in an endless gesture of objection. One image speaks of the private object that resonates with cultural and religious significance: the napkin of swaddling clothes, of burial shroud, of communion, of the altar. The legal gesture is public but vulnerable and tentative and exposing. The text speaks of a genteel gesture, possibly anachronistic and nostalgic. It at once lets rip the flying of flags and waving of banners and effaces them. A kind of needle's eye. All that has been. All that is to come.
David Hughes is a writer and artist and formerly editor of Hybrid and Live Art magazines.
