Portraits of Irish Art in Practice: Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge & Ursula Burke 3031340736, 9783031340734

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Portraits of Irish Art in Practice Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge & Ursula Burke

Jennifer Keating

Portraits of Irish Art in Practice

Jennifer Keating

Portraits of Irish Art in Practice Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge & Ursula Burke

Jennifer Keating Department of English University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-34073-4 ISBN 978-3-031-34074-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: John Carson, Professor Emeritus, School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Hardly are these words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man … Yeats

Ursula Burke Blue Sphinx 2020 The Supplicant VISUAL, Carlow

Ursula Burke Blue Sphinx Winged 2021 The Supplicant VISUAL, Carlow

Within our past collaborations, you would have never known about how difficult it can be for me, as an artist, to make the text and image work without the art feeling like an illustration, or feeling like the poem is about the art. Jason Griffin (with Jason Reynolds) Ain’t Burned All the Bright

For Liam and Finn Recognize the greats who walk among us. xx

Foreword

At the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, between 2015 and 2020, Jennifer Keating and I taught an interdisciplinary class on Art, Conflict and Technology in Northern Ireland. I was excited to be teaching with a colleague from the English Department, and sharing knowledge, from my world of the visual arts, and Jennifer’s world of drama and literature. Together with our students, we looked at the responses of artists, writers, and dramatists to the conflict in Northern Ireland, and how their work related to post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives. Research for the class involved several trips from Pittsburgh to Northern Ireland, which for me was a way of processing my Northern Irish past (I left in 1980) and getting up to date with a new generation of creative practitioners. During the research and teaching, I was delighted to be introduced to the work of contemporary Irish writers and playwrights with whom I was not familiar, while bringing to Jennifer’s attention, visual artists whose work I admired. Four practitioners who impressed us greatly, and whose work and personalities inspired our students, are now the subjects of this publication. The class enthusiastically responded to the energy, passion, and humor of Rita Duffy, the visual poetics of Mairéad McClean, the bold and uncompromising productions of Paula McFetridge, and the elegant skill and subversive strategies of Ursula Burke. Though their practices are distinct, each of the four artists has certain concerns in common, such as the role of women in the male-dominated

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territory, the corrosive effect of sectarianism, abuses of power, and societal division and inequality, whether in terms of gender, class, race, or the segregation caused by the demarcation and control of territorial borders, walls, and checkpoints. Our Carnegie Mellon students received an education in Irish history, not merely through facts and dates, but through the work of artists, writers, and dramatists, who can convey how it felt to be in a particular place at a certain time. For example, Mairéad McClean’s evocation of her father’s incarceration in her film No More, or Paula McFetridge’s protagonists describing happenings in significant locations, in-situ in Streets of Belfast (mobile app) or Quartered (peripatetic performance). Jennifer’s intense interrogation of the work of each artist is enhanced by the thoroughness of the personal information which she presents. Each chapter begins with detailed biographical material and observations obtained in conversations with the artists. We learn about their early family life and family values, and their social surroundings, in the city or country. We follow them through school days, to college, and coming of age. The knowledge of their backgrounds provides deep insights into the subject matter, the formation and evolution of their thinking, their opinions, and their work. Jennifer’s text, coupled with Njaimeh Njie’s and Arthur Horgan’s discerning photographs of the artists at their places of work, give us a set of well-rounded and intimate portraits. The combined effect of the four biographies indirectly provides us with a backdrop of everyday life and political events in Northern Ireland, from the sixties to the present day, setting the context for the artists’ early practice. Rita Duffy attended art college in Belfast during The Troubles when it was a quasi-old-colonial stronghold paying homage to the international art scene while ignoring what was going in in the streets outside. Rita was one of the relatively few students whose work was dealing with the sectarian warfare in the city, which was not academically “de rigueur.” Rita’s school days and college years coincided with some of the worst period of The Troubles, including the Civil Rights marches, Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, and the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. She was prolific and provocative. Perhaps because she was from a Catholic family, growing up in a Protestant neighborhood, Rita had an incisive insight into the bi-partisan culture of Northern Ireland, formidably expressed in paintings such as Mother Ulster and Mother Ireland, Segregation, Siege 1 and Siege 2. All of these paintings comment satirically on the duality

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of Northern Irish society, in their illustration of tortured souls from both sides of the religious/political divide, being kept separate by their contesting histories. Other painters were lampooning the partisan and macho iconographies of loyalist, republican, and British Army conflict in Northern Ireland, while Rita Duffy was depicting the effect of the violence on working-class women and children. Her use of caricature, humor, and irony challenged the bigotry of both sides. The impact of The Troubles on Mairéad McClean’s life was profound. She was 5 years old in 1971 when her father was interned without trial (for the second time in his life), due to his (perfectly legal) interest in socialist and Republican political ideologies. He was imprisoned for 10 months and subjected to interrogative torture during that time. After her secondary schooling in County Tyrone she was keen to leave Northern Ireland, and she successfully secured a place at Middlesex Polytechnic and moved to London in 1986. Her early work manipulated both found and family photographs to play with the vagaries of memory. Film became her primary medium. Eventually, she came to deal with the politics of her family’s past in 2005, with a hard-hitting documentary entitled For The Record (2009), which told the story of her father’s first internment (for 4 years) in Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast in 1956. Later, in 2014, her film No More tackled the subject of interment with a visually poetic collage of found footage, television news extracts, and pages from a child’s reading primer. In No More, the found and manipulated 1972 footage of actor/dancer Ryszard Cieslak, demonstrating hatha yoga body exercises, is completely engrossing, at times torturous, and at times balletically beautiful. The build-up of tension was teasing and agonizing, from the first baffling images of the fluttering limb to the flipping between positive and negative imagery, and the newsreel footage announcing interment. There is the suggestion of torturous confinement and constriction—yet resilience and self-control. Paula McFetridge was a child of West Belfast who grew up in the Catholic stronghold of Andersonstown in the 70s and the 80s when no end could be imagined to The Troubles. The family home was close to an interface area (an area of tension between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods) and so she experienced the effects of the barricades, the bombs, the bullets, and the British Army presence in everyday life. Her mother was from West Belfast and her father from Dublin. Both parents were accomplished in sports. While Paula’s 2 sisters were busy with sports activities, she was spending time in acting and drama classes. After a

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period of secondary school study at St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls, she failed to graduate at the first attempt, due to the distraction of her enthusiastic involvement in the Belfast Community Circus School. Eventually, she went to England to study theater at the prestigious liberal institution, Dartington College of Arts. There she was shocked to discover, the lack of knowledge, understanding, or any real interest in the politics of Northern Ireland. Before she completed her studies at Dartington, the world of live theater beckoned. She turned down an offer from a theater company in Scotland to work with Tinderbox Theatre Co.in Belfast. Ursula Burke grew up in Clonmel, a small town in Tipperary, and like Mairéad, she was keen to escape to the wider world. Her artistic ability was her ticket out, via the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, in Galway (G-MIT), to the University of Ulster in Belfast, which was an “electric” and exciting city to a girl from Tipperary at that time. Ursula arrived as a wide-eyed outsider, into a Belfast scenario when things were beginning to change for the better, after the IRA ceasefire in 1994, setting the scene for the Good Friday agreement in 1998. The signs and the residue of strife were still manifest on gable walls, in the 11thnight bonfires and 12th-day parades, with arguments over parade routes and “flegs,” and the ever-increasing peace walls, plus the sporadic acts of lingering sectarian violence. Ursula responded by re-imagining and re-working the iconography of this new Belfast reality into fascinatingly delicate, small porcelain sculptural forms. So, while each of the artists’ interaction with The Troubles took place in different ways, and at different times, the political strife and violence was a seminal influence in their work. Jennifer follows the personal and professional trajectories of each artist with an astute perception, and in so doing offers us access to that magical place where art and life intersect. In her introductory chapter Women’s’ Work, Jennifer refers to the visit of American art critic Lucy Lippard, to explore and offer commentary on political art in Ireland. Lippard remarked that she saw very little “activist” art in Ireland and acknowledged that she may not have been able to understand the local social and cultural references in the iconography and the layered imagery which she found “tantalizingly indirect.” The early days of The Troubles were a challenge to artists. How could you respond to such cataclysmic circumstances? What relevance had art when your whole world was literally being blown apart and everyday was uncertain? This was not an easy scenario to deal with. In such a threatening

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and volatile bi-partisan political atmosphere it was hard to find a way of commenting or responding without suggesting a sympathy or identification with one side or the other. Your declaration of affinity or even your perceived stance could be life-threatening, depending on the area where you lived. Who cares about what is showing at the Venice Biennale, when there are people being shot on your street? How do you find an alternative voice to the paramilitaries? How do you find an alternative voice to the art fashionista? The situation took time for artists to come to terms with. Gradually work emerged which grappled with the extremities of the political and social strife. Artists did respond, with varying degrees of directness and indirectness, generally in ways which condemned the use of violence from any quarter, by appealing to basic humanity and asking both communities in Northern Ireland to consider what they had in common, rather than stoking their differences. Lippard asserts the potential of artists to offer suggestions of alternative scenarios and behaviors, rather than resignation to, or commentary on, the status quo. Lippard also posits the distinction between artists who are socially concerned and those who are socially engaged. One comments and analyzes, while the other works with and/or within the community. Given that definitions can overlap to some degree, this distinction could be made between the work of both Duffy and McFetridge, whose practice involves collaboration with community and/or audience, and the work of McClean and Burke, which emphasizes reflection and contemplation, rather than active involvement. However, none of our four artists are followers of fashion or concerned with categorization. They have each created their unique artistic pathways and have been courageous in taking on board the past and present of their local and global communities. As times have changed, in post-conflict Northern Irish society, the work of each of the four artists has moved beyond The Troubles as a primary concern and has followed up on ongoing interests, in an Irish context and internationally. Their work has variously foregrounded issues such as COVID, Brexit, contentious borders, LGBTQ+ life, Black Lives Matter, gender discrimination, women’s rights, and human rights. While continuing her painting and drawing practice, Rita began to engage with public art projects such as her portraits of Divis Flats residents (entitled Drawing The Blinds) displayed for public view in the windows of their tower block at night. She conceived a media-friendly

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plan to tow an iceberg from the Arctic to Belfast, as a haunting reminder of the doomed Titanic as a symbol of Belfast’s wounded historical pride, but also a symbol of the melting away of old memories and animosities to allow for renewal. She took the concept of The Souvenir Shop, which she had created for the anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin and transferred it to an American context at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, where she drew parallels between the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the sixties, and the advent of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. She sold products from ‘the shop,’ which celebrated heroes and heroines of Black liberation struggles, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement which had taken to the streets at that time. In 2020 Rita was in residence at the Trinity College Long Room Hub, when the world was plunged into COVID lockdown, and she was initially at a loss. Ever creatively agile, she came up with an idea for an animation, commenting on the COVID phenomenon, but positively looking beyond it towards nature’s powers of renewal. The work was entitled Anatomy of Hope. No More feels like it was a huge catharsis for Mairéad, eventually finding a way to deal with a major family trauma, brought about by the colonial legacy of Northern Ireland. Subsequent works such as Making Her Mark (2018) and A Line Was Drawn (2019), are relatively calm, with a lightness of tone compared with earlier works. In addition to the continued use of filmic collage, visual layering, and a carefully measured aesthetic, there is humor and surrealistic play. Once again Mairéad eschews conventional narrative structure, to allow the viewer room for imagination and interpretation. While having political references to the North/South Irish border, historically and in the time of Brexit, the works evoke a more general contemplation of territorial division and proprietary rights, freedom of movement, and trade. Her exhibition HERE at Belfast Exposed (2022) drew on all her skills as a visual artist, in its combination of installation, photography, film, and video collage. At Tinderbox Paula initially concentrated on her acting skills until taking on the role of Artistic Director for convictions . convictions was an ambitious site-specific production by Tinderbox which utilized the notorious history and folk memories of the derelict Crumlin Road Courthouse, by taking an audience through parts of the building to experience six different plays by seven different playwrights, delivering a series of multiple viewpoints.

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Paula subsequently spent 5 successful years as Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast before accepting the position of Artistic Director of Kabosh Theatre. The experience and the success of convictions had made her realize her interest in site-specific theater and her commitment to Belfast, the place, and its people. Kabosh offered the opportunity to work as a producer and director on an incredible number and range of productions. She has also taken on various administrative and advisory roles, contributing to the advancement of the performing arts in Belfast. All of her activities have involved building community connections. Her interest in place-based artistic expression is akin to the area of contextual practice in the visual arts, where the context and/or location informs the meaning and interpretation of the work. While Paula points out that the majority of Kabosh’s output examines the legacy of conflict, productions have also concerned the Jewish community in Belfast, LGBTQ+ experience, women’s rights, and immigration. The theatrical devices of Paula McFetridge and Kabosh, put people in places, where they would be seeing things and hearing opinions that they would not otherwise encounter, and so find themselves obliged to consider the experiences of “the other.” In her work, Paula has continually dealt with the challenge of reconciling ingrained and opposing viewpoints. Ursula moved from Belfast references to more global and universal concerns and more oblique symbolism. Her installation The Precariat in Pittsburgh USA in 2017, contained several classical style porcelain busts, but contrary to the classical tradition, these busts were black and not white. Additionally, they were flawed and damaged, suggesting that they had been subjected to some kind of trauma. The work symbolically coincided with the Black Lives Matter street protests in the USA at the time. Another work that she exhibited in Pittsburgh was entitled The Politicians, which was an embroidery frieze, in the form of a series of panels depicting scenes of male politicians fighting in various parliamentary chambers in different parts of the world. While hailing from different countries and cultures, the work indicated that they all shared the same machismo and tendency to violence—in scenarios established for peaceful dialogue. The mocking humor in the work was enhanced by the unexpectedness of the delicate medium of embroidery, generally used by women for decorative or decorous imagery. This contradiction of subject

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matter with an unlikely choice of material is a recurring strategy that Ursula uses to good effect. Ursula went on to develop even more complex works in terms of material experimentation and breadth of reference. The exhibition entitled A False Dawn was an ambitious large-scale installation combining a variety of sculptural works. While paying homage to antiquity, with forms that were classical and baroque in style, the works challenged the idealism of those eras, with awkward formal juxtapositions and unlikely combinations of materials. Ursula creates a world of edgy uncertainty and enigmatic meanings, questioning established power structures and ideological assurance. The work of these four artists comes from a deep humanitarian motivation, to find ways of saying what needs to be said about integrity, respect, care, and empathy. Whatever they do in the future, it will undoubtedly be driven by concern and respect for human dignity and a commitment to the condemnation of injustice in all its forms. I congratulate Jennifer on her perceptive analysis and contextualization of the work of these four artists. I hope that you will find these life stories, descriptions of amazing artworks, and challenging theatrical productions inspiring, and I hope that the insights offered through these portraits will encourage you to follow through on the future work of these remarkable women. John Carson

Acknowledgments

In July 2022 my sons, Liam and Finn, met my second-class teacher, Mrs. Collins. She taught at St. Mary’s Primary School in Cobh, Co. Cork, for decades. She is now 92 years old. We met in the Anchor Bar, which she used to own but has since passed on to her children. She inherited the business as a young woman from her aunt and ran it, alongside her teaching career. It was within a short walk of my Nana’s home, situated on East Hill. From its bay windows, we looked out on the expanse of Cork Harbor. The calmly moving waters below a blue and virtually cloudless summer sky. Colorful yachts dotted the sea as it glistened in the sunlight. We quietly chatted for about an hour. My fourteen-year-old and ten-yearold boys were both awkward and transfixed, in the exchange. When my family emigrated from Ireland to California in 1988, we received a Christmas card from Mrs. Collins with a message written only in Irish—to ensure that I kept up the skill of reading the language. She also included a small gift, a printed sign to post in my bedroom in Santa Monica. It read: Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí [roughly translated, “praise the youth and it will flourish”]. From that Christmas onward, we received a yearly card from Mrs. Collins. She did not relinquish her role as educator, regardless of distance or the passage of time. Her expectations for each of her pupils were high. Mrs. Collins is only one of so many influential forces in my life. Each has helped me to develop into the thinker, the writer, the teacher, and the mother who I have become.

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They have taught me to accept guidance and to prepare to guide when my turn comes. These are principles that inform my own work with students. They influence my work with colleagues too. These are foundational forces that shaped the development of this book. I am deeply grateful to the subjects whose portraits compose its content. They were each willing to share intimate aspects of their artistic practice and private lives in an endeavor to offer access and insight into how they were shaped and what they, in turn, create for the world to explore. Ursula Burke, thank you for the generosity and care in our detailed conversations, your poised and playful optimism, a good laugh, and your admirable strength. Rita Duffy, thank you for your ferocity and fervor for life, your capable hands as an artistic force, your resilience, and admirable willingness to go for a cold-water swim in the sea. Mairéad McClean, thank you for your grace, your steely strength, a willingness to share your shrewd intelligence, and the example of your gentle yet powerful empathy. Paula McFetridge, thank you for your sharp wit, relentless work ethic, a hearty laugh, your palpable power, and keen mind. I am a student to each of you in life and I am in debt to your generous willingness to contribute to this project. John Carson, thank you for our almost decade of collaborative work. You are a dear friend, a generous colleague, and an artful teacher. It’s been a long and lovely road throughout the island of Ireland and back again to Pittsburgh, full of song, good laughs, and a bevy of memories. I have learned so much from you and look forward to seeing where that journey continues to take us. Thank you for your Foreword and for the cover. Sahana Thirumazhusai, thank you for teaching me in the guise of teaching you. Your focus and drive are an inspiration. I cannot wait to see “the places you will go.” Njaimeh Njie, I admire your work and I have learned so much from our conversations and shared journeys with this project and with my students. The book would not be what it is without your careful eye, your astute and powerful aesthetics, and your talented approach to narrative. I enjoyed driving the length of Ireland with you as we both documented and explored. My students at the University of Pittsburgh who have journeyed with me in Writing Places, thank you for your energy, your focus, and your willingness to explore. I have learned so much from you in our shared work on portraiture in written and visual forms, as we interrogate the meaning of place and our evolving relationships to those landscapes and built environments that we can narrate and describe and that in turn, reflect our own stories back to us.

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This book evolved from more than a decade of broader work and a myriad of relationships. I have benefited from the extraordinary commitments of educators in my past like Mrs. Collins, but also James F. Knapp, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Carr, Paul Hopper, and Shalini Puri as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, faculty and advisors at the University of Rochester like Tom Hahn, David Bleich, Beth Olivares, and Celia Applegate, and countless colleagues and students in Pittsburgh through my career at Carnegie Mellon University and more recently at the University of Pittsburgh. I hope that this work will demonstrate that we all can continue to learn from one another in other forms too. As we engage with the work that Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge share, we see that our past, present, and future, are deeply intertwined and prove continually instructive. In this spirit, my thanks go to Amy Burkert, David Kaufer, Richard Scheines, Kristina Straub, Jim Duesing, Wendy Arons, Brian Junker, Rich Purcell, Charlie White and Ana Maria UlloaShields from my tenure at Carnegie Mellon University; Gayle Rogers, Annette Vee, Jean Grace, Moriah Kirdy, Cory Holding, and the Global Studies Fellowship cohort of 2021 and the Mid-Career Writing Accountability Group(s) 2022–2023 at the University of Pittsburgh. You too have helped my thinking and kept me on task with this project. My thanks also go to colleagues at the European Studies Center, especially Allyson Delnore and Jae-Jae Spoon. I have also been supported by friends and family. The confidence and concern to pursue this book is directly related to the strength of my parents, John and Maureen. I am thankful for my partner Illah and our blended family, my Liam and Finn, and his Nikou and Mitra. You have been patient with me as I work. I am thankful as well to my siblings Robert, Paul, and Katy, my sister-in-law Leah, my nephews Jack and Mick. My family in Cobh, Co. Cork, Terri and Robert Byrne, Catherine and Eddie O’Halloran, Mike and Nora Keating and Mary Keating, my cousins, and their children. My cousins and friends, Meabh, Siobhan and Frances O’Neill, and Tyler Jensen. My dear friends Ashianna Esmail, Channa Cook, Cassie Saitow [née Baughman], Anjali Mazumder, Jaime Sidani, Emily Mohn-Slate, and Marguerite Hayes. Colleagues throughout the island of Ireland who have shaped my thinking include Dominic Bryan, Patricia O’Neill, Garrett Carr, Neil Jarman, Katy Radford, and many others. My friend and colleague, Colin Young-Wolff. You have each played a role and you have each energized the effort to pursue a

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project that is both hyper-local to the subjects profiled in the work and our collective relationship to the island of Ireland and beyond. Financial support for this project included two Faculty Research Grants through the University of Pittsburgh’s European Studies Center in AY 2020–2021 and AY 2021–2022, respectively. Support was also awarded through the Hewlett International Grant through the International Studies Center, and professional funds through the Department of English, the Writing Institute, and the College of Arts & Sciences, at the University of Pittsburgh. Early iterations of this work were explored through support for the Performing Peace in Northern Ireland project, in collaboration with John Carson, at the Center for the Arts in Society through the Performance initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. Additional indirect support came from the Dietrich College for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Vice Provost for Education Office at Carnegie Mellon University, for research and curricular design for the crossdisciplinary course, Art, Conflict & Technology in Northern Ireland, which directly impacted the research foundation for this book. Early presentations of this work were generously supported by the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago, Illinois and the Irish Consulate General Midwest in 2022. Grants and support allowed for research undertaken at the Imperial War Museum in London, UK, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland, the National Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Dublin, the Belfast Linen Hall Library in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery Wolverhampton Museum in Wolverhampton, UK and the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, Coventry in Coventry, UK. Thanks also go to Ann Boddaert and Michael Waldron at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, Marguerite Nugent at CV Life in Coventry, UK, Leonie O’Dwyer at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in Wolverhampton, Patrick Murphy at the Royal Hibernia Academy in Dublin, Ireland, Kim Mawhenny at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hugh Mulholland at the MAC Belfast, Northern Ireland, Deirdre Robb at Belfast Exposed, Belfast, Northern Ireland and Thomas Zanon-Larcher and Marta Michalowska at The Wapping Project, London, UK. Special thanks go to Ursula Burke, Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, and Paula McFetridge for permission to reproduce their respective work in images from their personal files. Thanks for permission to reproduce

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work include: the Crawford Art Gallery for permission to reproduce Rita Duffy’s Segregation, Guantanamo Amas Amat & The Emporer Has No Clothes ; VISUAL Carlow for permission to reproduce images from The Supplicant; Kabosh Theatre Co. for permission to reproduce visuals from This is What We Sang and Quartered Belfast, A Love Story; The Wapping Project for visuals from Making Her Mark and McClean on-site filming; The Linen Hall Library for permission to reproduce visuals of Tinderbox Co.’s script cover for convictions, Njaimeh Njie for images of Rita Duffy, Paula McFetridge and Mairéad McClean; and Arthur Horgan for images of Ursula Burke. Last but not least, I am thankful for my colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan. Thank you Lina Aboujieb, Samriddhi Pandey, Liviyaa Sree and Alice Carter for making this book possible.

Contents

1

1

Introduction: Women’s Work?

2

Rita Duffy

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3

Mairéad McClean

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4

Paula McFetridge

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5

Ursula Burke

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6

Closing and End Note by Sahana Thirumazhusai

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Correction to: Portraits of Irish Art in Practice

C1

Bibliography

185

Index

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About the Authors

Jennifer Keating is a Teaching Professor and the Writing in the Disciplines Specialist at the William S. Dietrich II Institute for Writing Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh. Most recently, she served as Assistant Dean for Educational Initiatives at the Dietrich College for Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests include curriculum design and delivery, collaborative pedagogical design, and interdisciplinary teaching. As a teacher, she explores writing and artistic practice that develops in locations in conflict and/ or emerging from strife, primarily in Ireland, Britain, South Africa and the United States, the influence of advancing technology on society and the politics of language. In recent years she has designed and taught courses in Composition and that cross disciplines. These include: Writing Places, Digital Humanity, First Year Program Who’s Watching Who? at the University of Pittsburgh and Art, Conflict & Technology, designed and taught in

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collaboration with an artist and a roboticist, and AI & Humanity, designed and taught with a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University. Recent book publications include AI & Humanity (MIT Press, 2020) coauthored with Illah Nourbakhsh, Patrick McCabe’s Ireland (Ed. Brill 2019) and Language, Identity and Liberation in Contemporary Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is coauthor of the AI and Humanity Oral Archive and recent articles have appeared in IEEE, AAC&U Liberal Education, ACM, and Critical Quarterly. She has received European Studies Center research grants, the Hewlett International grant, a Year of Data & Society Provost’s Initiative grant and a Pitt Cyber Accelerator grant at the University of Pittsburgh. At Carnegie Mellon University she received a Teaching Innovation Award (2016), a Carnegie Mellon University Center for the Arts in Society research grant (2015– 2018), a Carnegie Mellon University Wimmer Fellowship (2015), and the Michael Durkan Award for Best Book on Irish Language and Culture (2010). Jennifer earned a Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English and History at the University of Rochester.

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John Carson is an artist whose work has explored various media, contexts, and strategies. He has presented live performances, made Soundworks and CDs, broadcast work on television and radio, created installations, and both as a curator and artist, been involved in many types of “public art” projects. He has exhibited drawings, photographs, prints, and sculpture in such venues as The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, The ICA in London, CCA in Glasgow, IKON Gallery in Birmingham, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in Australia, The Aine Art Museum in Tornio Finland, PS1 in New York, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art Degree from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1976 and his Master of Fine Arts Degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1983. From 1986 to 1991 he was Production Director of Artangel, a London-based organization, which presented temporary artworks in public locations. In 1999 he co-edited Out of the Bubble, a book on contextual and professional practice within fine arts education. He has been a visiting lecturer at various schools and colleges in Ireland, UK, Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. He taught at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland and at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England, where he was Course Director of the BFA program from 1999 to 2006. From 2006 to 2016 he was Head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University where he taught until 2022.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Njaimeh Njie is a multimedia storyteller. Her photography, filmmaking, oral history, writing, and public artwork explore everyday aspects of contemporary life, with a particular focus on how the past shapes the present. Njie’s work has been featured in outlets including CityLab and Belt Magazine, exhibited in spaces including the Carnegie Museum of Art and The Mattress Factory, and she has presented at venues including TEDxPittsburghWomen, and Harvard University. Among several awards and grants, Njie was named the 2019 Visual Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh City Paper, and the 2018 Emerging Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Beyond her independent practice, Njie is the Founder/Lead Producer of the nonfiction storytelling company, Eleven Stanley Productions. Njie earned her B.A. in Film and Media Studies in 2010 from Washington University in St. Louis. Sahana Thirumazhusai recently graduated with a J.D. at Columbia Law School, where she was a Stone Scholar and Online Editor at the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Sahana is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied International Relations & Politics, and Social & Political History. A recipient of University Honors, she first worked with Dr. Keating on her Dietrich College Honors thesis regarding commemoration in Northern Ireland. Throughout law school, Sahana has pursued public interest work with organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety, the Global Justice Center, and Columbia’s Human Rights Institute. After graduation, Sahana will join Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Women’s Work?

Quattrocento put in paint, On backgrounds for a God or Saint, Gardens where a soul’s at ease; Where everything that meets the eye Flowers and Grass and cloudless sky Resemble forms that are, or seem When sleepers wake and yet still dream, And when it’s vanished still declare, With only bed and bedstead there, That Heavens had opened. W.B. Yeats

In 1984 Lucy Lippard was invited by Circa magazine to travel to Ireland to explore and offer commentary on political art. She was reticent to offer critique. Instead, she prefaced the article with a disclaimer: I realized that not only was the timing too tight to do the necessary research, but also that I simply didn’t know enough. What follows, then, is an essay on the general outline of activist art as developed in the U.S., and particularly in New York City, where my own work in the field is based …. I am hoping that the ideas below can be applied to Ireland by those more knowledgeable than myself and that they will open a dialogue within Ireland that seemed to me to be simmering already.1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_1

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Despite its oblique opening, Lippard’s essay offers meaningful descriptions of Irish art in that moment, and allusions to its political power. She writes, “I saw very little ‘activist art’ in Ireland, although I was told that I did see most of the ‘more political artists.’ By the end of my trip I had begun to perceive the subtle, and local, social imagery that was invisible in my initial ignorance. The complexity of Irish political life appears to be paralleled by the layered, contradictory images that I often found tantalizingly indirect. I was told that sometimes this indirectness was a rejection of the media’s sensationalist coverage of the Troubles.”2 Many contemporary artists of today, forty-years on, might still indirectly attend to the violence and implications of political dysfunction characteristic of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The legacies of these tumultuous years, and its subsequent twenty-five years of fragile and often cold peace since the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998, can manifest in indirectness, an oblique, or what Declan Long refers to as a “haunting” quality, in work attending to the region.3 While many artists in Ireland and the North of Ireland delicately engage with the region’s history of political tumult and strife, there are also groups of post-Troubles artists, in particular a cohort of female practitioners working across media and form, who directly and explicitly interrogate, explore, and interpret legacies of violence, sectarianism, misogyny and visions for political, social, and cultural alternatives to this history, in their practice. In these inquirybased practices we see provocative reckoning with the region’s challenges and triumphs, direct interrogation of local and international relationships with conflict and its complex aftermath, as well as a broad array of aesthetic expressions and explorations. These contrast with Lippard’s account in the early 1980s, suggesting an interesting complement and alternative way to consider work produced in the same time period and thereafter that Long attends to in his own recent critical work too. In this book four women are portrayed in their embodied physicality, lived experience and artistic practice. The reach of their work and its evolving vision, as a loose cohort or movement, suggests a powerful and dynamic collective set of explorations that offer a direct reckoning with Ireland’s past, its present, and imagined futures. Ursula Burke, Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, and Paula McFetridge are not formally connected. Their careers, their respective spheres of influence only occasionally overlap by location, by funder, in timing, or by topic. But their work is contemporaneous, their practices are inquiry-based, and as individuals who are regularly supported by the Irish Arts Council, the

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Northern Irish Arts Council, the British Arts Council, and other public bodies, their respective practices offer a compelling set of insights into the political and aesthetic concerns of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and its place in relation to the United Kingdom, the European Union, and global communities alike. Their work has been acquired for private and national collections, at home and abroad. They are invited to prestigious festivals for performance and exhibition. They hold residencies throughout the world and leverage their aesthetic pursuits in relation to academic criticism and analysis. In documenting and exploring their respective practices, we are given insight into where Irish artistic practice is today and where it might go in the very near future. This study is narrow but the artists’ collective work offers opportunity for scaled analysis by thematic threads. These range from the interrogation of concepts of justice, human rights and women’s rights to observations on the development of democratic processes and expression of identity. This group of women offers a rich and compelling snapshot of key concerns in Ireland and the North of Ireland today and, perhaps, into tomorrow. Portraits of each woman, her embodiment, her biographical details, documentation of her artistic practice, and analysis of key pieces of work demonstrate that the chapters of indirect and haunted relationships between contemporary politics and art in Ireland are not necessarily inclusive or comprehensive narratives of record. These synopses, while fitting for some communities of practice, do not capture other direct, courageous, and curious considerations of Ireland and Northern Ireland’s past and present as Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge do in their respective work. In some pieces, figures like McClean and Burke certainly allude to the haunting qualities of Ireland’s political past. They meet the characterization that figures like Long and Lippard refer to in their critical work, respectively. In other moments, their work is explicit in its critiques and concerns pertaining to living and making work in Ireland and the North of Ireland. Figures like Duffy explicitly interrogate and critique sectarianism, misogyny, and the abuse of power. McFetridge uses performance in the context of specific places as a form of interrogation that considers relationships between people, groups, and the contested and revered relationships to place through specific locations in Belfast, ranging from underground gay nightclub quarters to the city’s only synagogue. As we explore and investigate these individual practices and key pieces within

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the respective cadres of work, we can discern a distinct and complex relationship between these powerful figures in Irish arts and the political and historical context in which their work is situated and offers comment. Portraits of Irish Art in Practice serves as a complement to critiques pertaining to an Irish indirectness in artistic practice that Lippard, Long and other critics posit. In this collection of portrait essays, we document, analyze, and offer an alternative set of practices. These are works and approaches that are perhaps revolutionary but certainly subversive. In their consideration of lived politics, culture, and life in Ireland in relation to the world, Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge offer their own prisms and perspectives that ask us to look, and, to look again. Together, we explore with the artist as she teases out the riddles of our time. Each essay considers how visual and textual elements play with one another to capture each woman, and her distinct interpretations of her local and global communities. Through these journeys we are offered a vision of contemporary Ireland as it oscillates from the hyper-local intimacy of a studio or rehearsal stage to the expansive imagined communities and live audiences that inhabit a wider world.4 II. Political & Activist Art? In her influential essay for Circa, Lippard situates an exploration of political engagement through art in Ireland in a broader context. She suggests an account for how art interacts with social and cultural forces in a society as she writes: Art is suggestive. The motions it inspires are usually e-motions. Once art objects had literal power – magical / political powers – and the artist shared in this because s/he was needed by the community. (Who needs artists today? What for? Who decided the art object was to have such a limited function?). If the first ingredient of art’s power is its ability to communicate what is seen – from the light on an apple to the underlying causes of world hunger - the second is control over the social and intellectual contexts in which it is distributed and interpreted. The real power of culture is to join individual and communal visions, to provide ‘examples’ and ‘object lessons’ as well as the pleasures of sensuous recognition.5

This power of suggestion, rather than assertion, the notion of exploration, can be valued in artistic practice to invite opportunities for “examples” and “object lessons,” in addition to the “pleasures of sensuous

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recognition,” in a series of gestures towards meaningful human connections. Imagined points of connectivity, alignment, or perhaps even a basic moment of recognition can be politically powerful in a society in the throes of conflict or in the fragility of newly emerging peace. In Ireland and Northern Ireland, political violence rents social fabric. Couples, families, and communities, ranging from small towns like Beragh to metropolises like Belfast, Derry, and even further afield to Dublin and London, were racked by violence and the threat of violence propagated by a base and sinister inability to identify moments of recognition, fervent interactions that lacked acknowledgment of common humanity. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, populations were positioned and repeatedly conditioned to refuse recognition of common vulnerability, of a shared dignity, in the other as police, military, paramilitary, politicians, and citizens alike communicated political will through symbolic and physical violence. Lippard describes what she sees as a virtual absence of activist art in Ireland, as she understood the practice in the context of the United States. In response to this assessment of Irish artists’ “tantalizingly indirect” posture, John Kindness submitted a letter of concern to Circa. He wrote: To engage in the sort of activism she describes from her American experience the artist needs to be committed, s/he needs to take sides, to make choices; this is the choice that most artists find impossible to make in the Irish situation.6

In 1984, as military, paramilitary, and sectarian violence persisted, Kindness attunes Lippard and Circa’s readership to the palpable fear inherent in any form of expression that accompanies a cultural and political pressure to “take sides.” To “make [the] choices” that Kindness suggests “most artists find impossible,” signifies the potentially life-threatening implications for making and showing the kind of activist art that Lippard initially searches for in Ireland. Northern Ireland, in comparison to a country like the United States, is small. Victims often knew their perpetrators. Even as foreigners were brought in through the British military, they quickly came to know local civilians and paramilitary figures alike, as bodies moved and were regulated in their movement by formal military and informal paramilitary checkpoints. This was an intimate conflict, where artists and their work would not have the benefit of anonymity,

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nor figurative or literal mediation through separation. The implications for “taking sides,” which probably became clearer to Lippard in her travels, likely tempered her efforts to find “activist art” as she traveled throughout the island on her research trip. Or perhaps the resonance of “taking sides” was only evident to Lippard in its full manifestation after Kindness’s response, as she squared her observations of artistic practice in the early 1980s in Ireland and Northern Ireland with media coverage of ongoing violence and political quagmire. Whatever the impetus, Lippard positions her essay as an intuitive or learned recognition that activist art in Ireland will be different and will perhaps be muted or less explicit than the forms that are more familiar in her own American, or hyper-local New York, context. At least in the period that she writes. In the Circa essay Lippard lays out her own interpretation of activist art in the American context and teases out what she positions as complementary, though not necessarily contemporaneous, strategies of practice. These come to serve as contrasts between what she sees in Ireland and what she knows in America. She writes: Although ‘political’ and ‘activist’ artists are often the same people, and some work in experimental styles, there is a distinction (not a value judgment, but a personal choice) between those who are socially concerned and those who are socially involved. The former comments and analyzes while the latter works within its context, with its audience. The two are mutually valuable.7

With the luxury of time, perhaps we can more readily read features of Irish and Northern Irish artistic practice as primarily “socially concerned” rather than “socially involved,” as we contextualize Lippard’s observations in Ireland? We can also consider the trajectory of the work throughout the conflict and the subsequent movements of practice thereafter. Perhaps “socially concerned work,” whether direct or oblique, allows us to consider how some, though not all, Northern Irish artists in the Troubles period attended to the political and social context on the streets outside of their homes, classrooms, or studios through “tantalizingly indirect” strategies that Lippard found curious but Kindness found brave though almost “impossible?” Figures like Kindness, Rita Duffy, Willie Doherty, John Carson, Margaret McWilliams, Paul Seawright, Locky Morris, Donovan Wylie, and others developed inroads to engage with the political context that shaped their own and their communities’ lives,

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while also offering a direct communication of what was “seen” as Lippard describes. They found strategies to attend to the social context that they witnessed or even participated in through daily living in Northern Ireland in the context of the Troubles. Yet their work exhibits varying and contrasting levels of direct and explicit engagement with these features of “socially concerned” work, as well as indirect qualities in keeping with Kindness’s prescription and Lippard’s observations. Depending on the specific work, each artist might actually embody aspects of the “socially concerned” and the “socially involved” practice, in turn. “Socially concerned” artists might have had to choose the direct or indirect approach with which they were most comfortable in the Troubles period, as Kindness asserts in his letter to Circa. But as the conflict persisted and moved into a period of relative peace with the 1994 IRA ceasefire and the subsequent 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement, the terms and manifestation of “socially concerned” and “socially involved” artistic practice shifted further. In “Art and Politics in the Eighties, 1990,” collected in Sources in Irish Art: A Reader edited by Fintan Cullen, Joan Fowler reflects on the Lippard and Kindness exchange. She writes: In these statements neither Lippard nor Kindness acknowledges partition and although there was nothing new in the idea that Irish art is indirect (i.e. The Delighted Eye exhibition, London, 1980) it did seem to have a particular import coming from Lucy Lippard. Her visit became part of a process in a general shift in thinking towards political content among several young Northern Artists. Even so, when this culminated in the Directions Out exhibition in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 1987 as a showcase for ‘political art’ from the North, the curator, Brian McAvera, decided to make a virtue of indirectness. Here, as in the Irish landscape exhibition, The Delighted Eye, the supposed avoidance of direct statement or the ‘oblique approach’ was made into an Irish personality trait, thereby realigning art with nature instead of art with politics. John Kindness, however, is suggesting that the Irish situation is different to the American and in Ireland one cannot make an absolute choice. An obvious example of Kindness’s difficulty is in the North where an individual may feel obliged to be either Nationalist or Unionist because there is not substantive political ground in between. But in no sense does this prevent the artist from broadening the narrow definitions of Nationalism and Unionism, or from creating provisional solutions to a particular set of problematics. Whatever the status quo of the ballot box, the artist can, in artistic terms, deal with

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the inadequacies of his or her society, or even be pedagogic in suggesting a different society and be at the same time consistent in using electoral politics. There are no more irrevocable choices in politics than in art, even if Unionist and to some extent Nationalist interests have polarized the situation in such a way that the democratic right to choose is very limited.8

As she assesses the dichotomy presented in the Lippard-Kindness exchange, Fowler sizes up the concerns of the political context. She highlights restraining aspects of Northern Ireland’s political stagnation borne out of the legacies and structures of partition as well. In creating a “Protestant Government for a Protestant People,” as Prime Minister Sir James Craig declared in 1934, Northern Irish politics were doomed from partition onward.9 An outpour of desperation and violence from 1969 onward were a seeming inevitability. The agitated response to such political structure, skewed to privilege the minority population, seemed the only prospective reply to the impossible, apartheid-like political system erected from 1921 onward. It was a system that poised the Protestant/ Unionist majority to lord over a Catholic/Nationalist minority. In the political reckoning the world over from the late 1950s onward, where rights to fair and suitable housing, access to education, voting rights, reproductive rights, and a myriad of other civil liberties were sought and eventually demanded in various movements and civil outbursts in 1968 and 1969, Northern Ireland, like so many places, was particularly vulnerable for a political awakening and reckoning. The features of strife that emerged were class-based, focused on issues of equitable access to housing, employment, and voting rights. But violence broke out across readily appropriated historic sectarian divisions. As non-violent protest tactics adopted by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association were greeted with violence, measures for attaining a reimagined political will cascaded into the decades of division and violence that we now know as The Troubles. Emergence from these aspects of the political quagmire borne out of partition could only be accomplished with a revised treaty or agreement that might more fairly address the elusive and deeply flawed past approaches to the Irish Question by the British government and its citizens. With a potentially fresh and new chapter of emerging democratic processes to counter the British colonial enterprise in prior centuries, the mid-to-late 90s offered the prospect of real political change that could offer a viable pathway out of decades of violence and strife.

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We saw glimpses of this in the novel Belfast Agreement in 1998. After more than twenty years of delivering on facets of this promise, much was unraveled in the context of bedlam and confusion associated with Brexit in recent years. This has been compounded, of course, by repeated suspensions of the devolved Northern Ireland assembly. Fowler’s impatience with allowing the Lippard-Kindness exchange to languish, however, offers a particular set of demands and expectations for a “socially concerned” though not necessarily “socially involved” manifestation of artistic practice that Lippard also describes. For Fowler, the artist need not concede to the expectations or pressures of understanding “the supposed avoidance of direct statement or the ‘oblique approach’” as a virtual “Irish personality trait” in artistic practice. Instead, she expects that the contemporary Irish artist can broaden narrow concepts of positionality, identity or political category in Northern Ireland through vibrant practice. As she sets forth these challenges for Irish and Northern Irish artists, Fowler suggests that the artist might in fact expand “narrow definitions of Nationalism and Unionism” or create “provisional solutions to a particular set of problematics.” She acknowledges the power of partition in 1921 that affirms and solidifies political binaries of a Unionist Northern Ireland and a Nationalist Republic of Ireland, rendered in Sir Craig’s terms as Protestant versus Catholic. Fowler rightly asserts its longstanding influence on direct and indirect political activism in art but this is true in all sectors of Irish life too. The subsequent Civil War in Ireland, shortly after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the fifty years of virtual silence in regard to national commemoration to recognize the founding of the Free State with the 1916 Easter Uprising, support her recognition of the unsaid and poorly veiled acknowledgment of partition and its legacies as a potent threat, with longstanding adverse influences on either side of the border.10 There was a general fear in Ireland in particular, that the legacies of division fought out in the Civil War, and buried in the formation of the Republic, smoldered still in the Northern Irish State. For decades the Irish government and its citizens feared such embers of division could be re-inflamed if unrest in the North were to travel South. Despite these realities, Fowler goes on to affirm that “the artist can, in artistic terms, deal with the inadequacies of his or her society, or even be pedagogic in suggesting a different society,” while consistently using the parameters of “electoral politics” to do so. Akin to Lippard, Fowler demands that the artist, and perhaps the citizen alike, can always find inventive ways to express or push the parameters of electoral politics

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to build a more viable or representative political system. Recent Irish and Northern Irish governmental support of artistic interventions on legacies of history and commemoration in grants for the Decade of Centenaries in Ireland, for example, demonstrate that this period is not only upon us but that Irish artists are indeed undertaking the challenge of a “pedagogic” exercise in exploration through their expressions as well. Fowler holds the artist accountable to find ways to engage with the political and cultural contexts that influence their practice. While she respectfully greets Kindness’s concern with the “impossibility of choosing a side” with compassion, her demands remain. Fowler asks the artist to explicitly interrogate their social and political context, to acknowledge or at least work within the limitations and constraints put upon a society under duress or in conflict. But her expectation is that the artist will nonetheless persevere. She asks the artist to hold a poignant and influential role in offering sets of public inroads to clearer pictures of what is “seen,” as Lippard might describe it. And like Lippard, Fowler asserts that the artist can harness the “real power of culture.” Without restraining prescriptions, Fowler and Lippard alike call for socially concerned or socially involved art to help publics see what is culturally possible and socially powerful in the community where they practice. To inhabit such a practice in the Troubles period was brave and bold. But to extend the work in the post-Troubles period carried its own implications and responsibilities too. Long’s Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland catalogues and analyzes this work from the late 1990s to the present. As he describes, it is a book about “art and haunting.” Long writes: It is an argument for haunting, and for the contemporary art field as a specific sphere of haunting and hauntedness. The book proposes that the art of the post-Troubles period addresses itself to a speculative ‘public space’ in which certain spectres, often unwelcome elsewhere in the culture, might be accommodated or confronted. At the same time, the artworks selected for discussion here can also have their own spectral quality. They are characterized by a heightened sense of in-betweenness and representation, spatial or temporal instability, caught in the anxious present, between a troubled past and an uncertain future, positioned between difficulties and identities determined by local conditions and the pressures and possibilities of increasingly evident global forces, much of the art discussed here is not sure of its place in the world.11

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Long’s catalogue and documentation of work that “addresses itself to a speculative ‘public space’ in which certain spectres, often unwelcome elsewhere in the culture, might be accommodated or confronted,” is spoton. In its gradual emergence from hot and frequent tit-for-tat casualties, fever-pitch rancor and bloodshed endemic to three decades of outright conflict associated with the Troubles, which influenced many artists to align with Kindness’s assertion that to choose a side was “impossible,” the haunted qualities that Long addresses are expected and well-focused. The arts, in regard to visual, performance, dramatic, literary, and musical forms of expression, played an outsized role in a society emerging from conflict and coming to terms with its variety of manifestations of trauma and loss. In Northern Ireland the Good Friday Peace Agreement did not include the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission likened to South Africa’s emergence from decades of conflict in the dismantling of apartheid. The conflict was perceived as too dirty, by the multi-national peace brokers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, to allow for public catharsis through transparent reckoning of injustice done and systemic collusion undertaken. Former combatants, military and police perpetrators were given amnesty. Some victims were offered compensation for what was deemed quantifiable loss by the powers-thatbe. Individuals and groups were encouraged to move on, with positivist slogans that suggested access to prospective dividends of peace. Whether just or unjust, Northern Ireland’s citizens were swept along by powerful factions in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States, and others to focus on the historic accomplishment of an end to violence and the establishment of a fledgling democratic system after decades of frothing hate, emergency legislation, bloodshed, and a general sentiment of terror and bleak prospects for change. This transition, brought forward with the ratification of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, had much worthy of celebration and recognition. But the road to lasting and meaningful peace, and the development of truly robust democratic processes, has been long and troubled. There have been no easy solutions and sustainable stability seems fleeting, even when it happens to be in sight. Long’s work identifies and links themes across media. He interprets works produced by post-Troubles Northern Ireland artists to share a “heightened sense of in-betweenness and representation, spatial or temporal instability, caught in the anxious present, between a troubled

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past and an uncertain future, positioned between difficulties and identities determined by local conditions and the pressures and possibilities of increasingly evident global force.” This is accurate and fitting for the artists and specific work addressed in his book. But other work and practices, fused in and about Northern Ireland, offer productive and poetic counterpoints too. Some artists, like Rita Duffy, can be characterized as both delicate and fierce in the explicit interrogations and explorations of Northern Ireland’s troubled history throughout her practice. Even in moments of heightened conflict and provocative political gamesmanship in Belfast and Northern Ireland, Duffy has artfully used satire and play to directly imagine alternatives to perceived limitations in electoral politics. Collections and individual pieces like Segregation; Seige II ; Outposts ; The Emperor Has No Clothes and numerous other works directly attend to the region’s issues and connections to global concerns. As a director and artistic director, McFetridge’s production of convictions and Green and Blue cogently tackle the specters of Northern Ireland’s past in plain light. Burke and McClean attend to state-sponsored violence and infringements on human rights in Burke’s sculptures, The Wounding , and McClean’s films, No More and A Line Was Drawn, respectively. While elements of their practices are haunted by Northern Ireland’s past, these artists choose to attend to the historical legacies that live in contemporary Ireland and Northern Ireland, head on. Long’s analysis is accurate but it is not comprehensive. Nor does it make any such claim. But if the record is not complete, what might we gain from a serious consideration of a cross-section of work that is not solely characterized by its ghostly qualities? Work that instead offers a multitude of energetic inquiries into some of the most challenging questions of its time and its place? What might we learn or decipher if we identify, document, and analyze the very work that Kindness suggests might be impossible but Lippard and Fowler categorize as deeply moving and powerful when it is possible to express? In Long’s documentation and catalogue of artists who align with haunting qualities that he argues are defining features of post-Troubles art, he writes: Often it has been an art of uneasy experimentation with ways of making visible the lost, forgotten or the marginalized: those stray images, issues or stories that are now incompatible with official visions of the post-conflict society. These offbeat aftermath studies undertaken by visual artists have

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sometimes shadowed more mainstream forms. In some instance, visions of the changing (and in important ways unchanging) society are proposed that acknowledge the conventions of wider media coverage but that operate with different intentions, employing alternative models of presentation and distribution – in ways that may have disconcerting, unpredictable and defamiliarizing effects. Such artworks are determinedly indeterminate ‘after-images’ that may prioritise fretfully subject forms of viewing or precarious modes of composition and display. They are strategically uncertain in forming an account of the historical moment.12

Arguably, these “strategically uncertain” forms that can “account of the historical moment,” can offer the exact kind of widening and refashioning of electoral politics that Fowler might have called for. Long suggests that these “stray images, issues or stories that are now incompatible with official versions of the post-conflict society” play crucial roles in embodying the very communication of “what is seen.” This is precisely what Lippard so carefully privileges in her understanding of the powerful role that art and the artist can and [maybe] should play. These strategically haunting qualities are emblematic of work by artists like Doherty, Seawright and even facets of McClean’s practice. But in contrast to the real and perceived virtue of indirectness in Irish, Northern Irish, and post-Troubles art, how might we value and catalogue direct work as well? Perhaps it is not work that makes the impossible choice of aligning with a particular side as Kindness warns against. But it is work that cultivates a practice borne from explicit interrogation and commanding, deliberate engagement, and exploration. In the work offered by Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge, I argue that we have a robust and meaningful complement to the artists that Lippard, Fowler, and Long consider. We will ask why this work may not have necessarily had the same “control over the social and intellectual contexts in which it is distributed and interpreted,” as Lippard asks us to consider. And we will investigate how this small group of women can offer “real power of culture to join individual and communal visions, to provide ‘examples’ and ‘object lessons’ as well as the pleasures of sensuous recognition” when we consider their gradual and increasingly decipherable rise to prominence. We will consider how their visions influence the world around them. We question how their physical embodiment as women, in the short-term at least, may have also limited their access to wide-scale distribution and interpretation of their work. Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge are not ethereal beings.

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These are not spectral figures. Instead, they are powerful, complex, living women who each have much to show us in their local and global socially involved practice, now and in the years to come. III. Embodiment In 2018 Anna Burns was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Milkman, a novel that captures provincialism, interiority, absurdity and sometimes terror for a woman coming of age in 1970s Northern Ireland. Voiced from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old woman, Milkman captures the claustrophobic features of a closely knit family, and community, in war-torn Belfast. The protagonist is stalked by a paramilitary tough as she navigates the space between her seemingly unutterable ambitions for escape and the demands of everyday life in the working-class. As readers we traverse the world of tiny urban enclaves, clouded by smoke, bombed out debris, and smoldering hatred. We visit her fleeting moments of escape: “reading-while-walking,” running through Alexandra Park and stolen moments of intimacy with “maybe-boyfriend.” A potent characteristic of the novel, aside from its crushingly funny cheek and a rich symphonic rendering of Northern Irish speech patterns, is the litany of recognizable codes of behavior and learned roles and rules of engagement for women in particular social circles, rungs of class, and in specific periods of late twentieth-century Ireland and Northern Ireland. Burns’ protagonist lays out some of these learned rules quite early in the book as she carefully looks for avenues to resist the dangerous scenario of the Milkman’s advances: This was the ‘I’m male and you’re female’ territory. This was what you could say if you were a girl to a boy, or a woman to a man, or a girl to a man, and what you were not – at least officially, least not in public, least not often – permitted to say. This was certain girls not being tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the superiority of males, might even go so far as almost to contradict males, basically, the female wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself. Not all boys and men though, were like that. Some laughed and found the affronted men funny. Those ones I liked – and maybe-boyfriend was one of that lot. He laughed and said, ‘You’re having me on. Can’t be that bad, is it that bad?’ when I mentioned boys I knew who loathed each other yet united in rage at the loudness of Barbara Streisand; boys incensed at Sigourney Weaver for killing the creature in that new film when none

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of the men in that film had been able to kill the creature; boys reacting against Kate Bush for being catlike, cats for being female-like, though I didn’t tell about cats being found dead and mutilated up entries to the point where there weren’t many of them left in my area anymore. Instead I ended on Freddie Mercury still to be admired just as long as it could be denied he was in any way fruity, which had maybe-boyfriend setting down his coffee pot – only he and his friend, chef, out of everybody I knew had coffee pots – then sitting down himself and laughing all over again.13

In its fleeting and colloquial style, Burns chalks up the scenario for many women coming of age through the 1960s, 1970s, and the 1980s. Not every man was of the ilk or positioning that the protagonist describes, who violently held women accountable to these prescribed codes of behavior or punished those who broke the code. But the tenets of Northern Irish and Irish society, the structures and the features of the cultural and social expectations that pushed against many women and flattened their abilities to resist, to stand up for themselves, to be heard, to strive against the patriarchy are palpably felt in the narrative. To be “wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself,” was dangerous. And as indicated in the arc of the novel, this was behavior that was not readily forgiven in a thinly veiled cult of misogyny. Burns’ ability to capture the patriarchal power structure, to acknowledge its inadvertent and direct damage, its residual trails in the contemporary moment that are cast in bright light in the wake of #METOO decades later, liberate and render loud hushed stories shared by women from this generation. Whispered warnings to avoid the accusation of “loudness,” to learn what you “could” say or couldn’t, officially, “least not in public,” also sowed a new generation of resistance. Learning the unsaid but lived rules of that “official ‘male and female’ territory, and what females could say and what they could never say,” leaves the protagonist with saying “nothing.” Initially she yields in silence when the Milkman “slowed, then stopped my run … he didn’t seem rude, so I couldn’t be rude and keep on running.”14 But through the course of the novel, the protagonist resists as well. This is especially pertinent if we consider the full novel as her willingness to be “loud” and tell her full-throated story. In moments where she starts to run, again, we see emergence of this resistance. In articulating an eventual trajectory of ‘no’ as a counter to the Milkman’s advances and usurpations, to her mother, to sisters and brother-in-law, Burns’ leading lady may even be considered

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“pedagogic,” as Fowler asserts, as a character and as a guiding voice. A narration of evolving resistance, ambition, and assertiveness allows Burns to share a vision of the woman who can square up and perhaps kill the creature “when none of the men in that film had been able to kill the creature,” even if it is years in the making and leveraged as a retrospective. Our protagonist, and Burns alike, might first be greeted with a knowing giggle by some readers. But they are respectively, and quickly, understood for their power. Such expression stretches the political reality of its time, a point and counter-point to acknowledge the power of patriarchal conservativism in Northern Ireland and Ireland. But the novel is a documentary of sorts as well, as it voices evolutionary resistance to these power structures. The contradictions and complexity of gendered roles in Ireland and Northern Ireland, now and then, are readily discussed and explored in academic scholarship that spans the twentieth and twenty-first century. That discourse need not be rehashed in this work to fully frame analyses. But influential discourse from the early 1980s and 90s, contemporaneous to Lippard’s visit to Ireland and Fowler’s subsequent critical work, can offer some insights on how Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge navigate and act on their respective ambitions as they come of age and navigate formal and informal education. As we document and note the spaces and environments that they each negotiated akin to Burns and the female voices that she captures, we can frame their respective narratives in particular local and global contexts of discourse. In 1985, Judith Butler interrogates female embodiment and its social, cultural, and political implications and influences in “Variations on Sex and Gender in Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault.” Butler writes, Becoming a gender is an impulsive yet mindful process of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos and prescriptions. The choice to assume a certain kind of body, to live or wear one’s body a certain way, implies a world of already established corporeal styles. To choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that reproduces and organizes them anew. Less a radical act of creation, gender is a tacit project to renew a cultural history in one’s own corporeal terms.15

Echoes of this work can be deciphered later in her pivotal work “Merely Cultural,” as described in Jules Glesson’s “Judith Butler: The Early Years.”16 But if we consider prescient conceptions and theories of gender

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performance in 1985, in relation to the processes of “interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos and prescriptions,” we find meaningful, albeit expected, points of connectivity and affirmation in Burns’ narrative. If to “choose a gender is to interpret received gender norms in a way that reproduces and organizes them anew,” then Butler suggests that these choices can be made rather than coerced. Arguably, we know, that this is not always sociologically, historically, or politically possible without the threat of symbolic or physical violence to which Kindness attunes us in a slightly different, though related context, in Northern Ireland. Rather than a “radical act of creation,” Butler suggests that “gender is a tacit project to renew a cultural history in one’s own corporeal terms.” An assertion that such choice is available and possible can be argued in regard to particular times and place i.e. to “interpret received gendered norms in a way that reproduces and organizes them anew” in the reinstated Taliban rule in Afghanistan circa 2021 would not readily suggest such reproduction and renewal would be safe or greeted with anything other than violence or death if women were to “organize themselves anew” by returning en masse to the workforce or schooling. But to consider the manifestation of prescribed and perhaps dictated gender “taboos and prescriptions” in Ireland and Northern Ireland, from the 1960s to the present, is part of the enterprise in this book as well. As Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge receive and interpret the “official ‘male and female’ territory, and what females could say and what they could never say,” in their respective homes, communities, experiences in formal and informal education, and in the advent and development of their respective artistic practice, we are offered insights into a “radical art of creation.” Their embodiment as women, as practicing artists can be understood as a renewal of cultural history, in their respective and dynamic, “corporeal terms.” As each woman negotiates how she is perceived in the expression and indeed performance of her gender, in relation to her own “socially concerned and socially involved” expression of that gender, we gain insight into the individual life. We are also granted access to elements of the social, cultural, and political context that she inhabits and explores in her own place-based practice as well. In “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” Butler writes:

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The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations. But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.17

Here Butler attends to the social and cultural projections and relationships influenced by our bodies that are actively “scripted with cultural codes.” She also acknowledges that our “embodied selves” do not “preexist cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.” Instead, we negotiate these relationships as individuals and groups. We slide between the signifiers culturally, socially, and politically pushed upon us as individuals, and the modes of embodiment with which we identify and express ourselves. It is these tensions that are explored along various lines of inquiry and narrative in this book. Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge have each come of age in Ireland and Northern Ireland from the 1960s onward. They have negotiated their individual power to express and grow into their own manifestation of an embodied self. They also navigate the myriad of expectations, tropes, and misplaced projections that are thrust upon them. Strong families, interesting partnerships, influential friendships, and challenging formal and informal educational experiences help to shape these journeys. Narration of key facets of this push–pull relationship is reflected in the choice of form for this book. Portraiture, rather than biography or cultural criticism, is the genre chosen to articulate the power of a contemporary snapshot of artistic practice in Ireland and Northern Ireland. As we engage with visual features, woven into textual elements of each subject’s portrait, a framing of the artists’ embodiment, documentation of practice, articulation of vision, and reach for the work can allow us to consider how this group of artists offer “an ability to communicate” what they see, and how they powerfully shape what can be politically, socially, and culturally imagined. In this book we navigate mixed media in each woman’s varied work and diverse approaches. We play with and layer expression and insights as we frame each woman’s coming of age with biographical information that is then brought into discourse with analysis of key and formative works. In The Art & Science of Portraiture, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot writes: In creating the text, the portraitist is alert to the aesthetic principles of composition and form, rhythm, sequence, and metaphor. The portraitist’s standard, then, is one of authenticity, capturing the essence and resonance

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of the actors’ experience and perspective through the details of action and thought revealed in the context. This process of creating the narrative requires a difficult (sometimes paradoxical) vigilance to empirical description and aesthetic expression. It is a careful deliberative process and a highly creative one. The data must be scrutinized carefully, searching for the story line that emerges from the material. However, there is never a single story – many could be told. So the portraitist is active in selecting the themes that will be used to tell the story, strategic in deciding on points of focus and emphasis, and creative in defining the sequence and rhythm of the narrative. (12)18

The subjective enterprise that is Portraits of Irish Art in Practice is readily captured in Lawrence-Lightfoot’s description of method and craft. To write a portrait essay is to oscillate around a core, gravitational pull towards the authentic. I.e. how can I capture each artist’s voice or vision as a creator, her perspective as an analyst, her shrewdness as a thinker, her expectations as a citizen? How can I weave a robust cultural and social context that documents how she is perceived by the world? How she expresses and corrects such perceptions in her own aesthetic practice, the relationships she keeps, and the influence she has on her local and farreaching communities? This is subjective work. I create a narrative that stitches “empirical description and aesthetic expression.” There is “never a single story – many could be told.” Yet there is deep value and meaning in the story that indeed emerges in the telling. There is a certain truth in the documentation and the utterances that these portraits offer. They are valuable, influential, and perhaps they suggest a demand that this exercise can and should be repeated far and wide, across countries, languages, and practices. In this book you will join Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge on pathways towards coming of age. You will read about their schooling, family, influential travel, and intermittent challenges. You will be introduced to key works that led to meaningful pivots in their practice, attention-catching productions, and professional moments of doubt and hardship. In Duffy’s chapter, we attend to early work like Segregation and elements of Outposts , before moving to more contemporary work like The Emperor Has No Clothes , Anatomy of Hope, and others. McClean’s portrait attends to films like No More, Making Her Mark, and Broadcast and exhibitions and projects like Here and Beyond 22. In McFetridge’s essay, we attend to early artistic director productions like convictions with Tinderbox and several Kabosh Theatre Co. productions that include

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directing This is What We Sang , Two Roads West , Green and Blue and Quartered Belfast, A Love Story. In Burke’s portrait, we focus our analytical lens on works like The Politicians Frieze, a variety of sculptures in series like The Wounding and exhibitions like The Precariat, A False Dawn and The Supplicant. As Lawrence-Lightfoot acknowledges, many stories can be told. But in the loose collection of the storylines that emerge in each woman’s portrait in this book, I ask you to consider, how many other stories can be told too? In Ireland? In Northern Ireland? The world over? As we document and weave the narratives of Burke’s, Duffy’s, McClean’s and McFetridge’s life and practice, we suggest the power of individual and collective exploration and commentary on the world that we currently live in. This book is not necessarily just a retrospective on four individual women living and working in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is an invitation for more consideration of the way that practicing artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers capture and shape the world that we live in. I focus on four key women in this work. But the enterprise is one worthy of repetition in other cities, towns, countries, and regions to attune ourselves to the challenges and celebrations that this work catalogues. In addition to scholarly work like Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, Long’s Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and PostTroubles Northern Ireland and Sinéad McCoole’s No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900–1923, this work has also been deeply influenced in form by Bridget Quinn’s Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order), Charlotte Painter and Pamela Valois’s Gifts of Age, David Kaufer and Brian Butler’s Designing Interactive Worlds with Words: Principles of Writing As Representational Composition, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis’ The Art and Science of Portraiture and a myriad of others. It is not necessarily novel work in its form but it is important and meaningful in its conviction to focus on living female artists. In the preface to the paperback version of Long’s Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland, he writes: More than twenty years after signing the Good Friday Agreement, many of the unresolved disputes that lay buried beneath the ambiguous language of that precious and precarious multi-party accord have resurfaced and intensified. The shock and chaos of Brexit has made productive dialogue between Northern Irish politicians, and between elected leaders

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in Britain and Ireland, significantly more difficult. The questionable role adopted by the Democratic Unionist Party since the 2017 Westminster election – as confidence-and-supply upholders of a fragile, riven, substantially unscrupulous Conservative government – has served to further unbalance and impede negotiation in Belfast. Other issues, other disasters, have – perhaps permanently – damaged power-sharing relationships. Other political dysfunction has had, nonetheless, diverse and unpredictable consequences. (xiii)19

In the precarious shambles that we inhabit emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, a new ground war in Europe, perpetrated by Vladimir Putin against the westward leaning Ukraine, populist conservatism on the rise in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, as well as the age of the autocrat as a full and real threat, voices of dissidence, and expressions of critique are needed. We seek expressions that can inspire and help manifest alternatives to these bleak realities. Long’s attention to the ghostly qualities that haunt artistic practice are valuable as they catalogue and consider the variations and meaning of these meditations on the meta-spaces conjured and taken in the noise of “political dysfunction” and “unpredictable consequences.” But Burke, Duffy, McClean, and McFetridge offer something else. Their spirited approach, a driving quality to attend to the oblique and the central alike, offer demands laden with hope, critique layered with levity, adoption of the absurd, the sting of satire and moments of gentleness, and a care for delicacy that suggest a poignant moment in Irish arts. This book allows us to engage fully with this powerful approach to exploring, responding, and attempting to make sense of the complex world that we each inhabit.

Notes 1. Lucy Lippard, “Activating Activist Art,” Circa, July–August 1984: 11. 2. Ibid. 3. Declan Long, Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017), 4. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991). 5. Lucy Lippard, “Activating Activist Art,” Circa, July–August 1984: 13. 6. Joan Fowler, “Art and Politics in the Eighties, 1990,” Sources in Irish Art: A Reader, Ed. Fintin Cullen (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2000), 288. 7. Lucy Lippard, “Activating Activist Art,” Circa, July–August 1984: 14.

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8. Joan Fowler, “Art and Politics in the Eighties, 1990,” Sources in Irish Art: A Reader, Ed. Fintin Cullen (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2000), 288. 9. Sir James Craig, Unionist Party, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. 21 November 1934, Reported in Parliamentary Debates, Northern Ireland House of Commons, Vol. XVII, Cols. 72–73, https://cain.uls ter.ac.uk/issues/discrimination/quotes.htm: The PRIME MINISTER: … If a man is a Roman Catholic, if he is fitted for the job, provided he is loyal to the core, he has a good chance of appointment as anybody else; and if a Protestant is not loyal to the core, he has no more chance than a similar Roman Catholic. Mr. O’NEILL: How do you test their loyalty? The PRIME MINISTER: There are ways of finding that out. The hon. Member knows just as well as I do there are ways of discovering whether a man is heart and soul in carrying out the intention of the Act of 1920, which was given to the Ulster people in order to save them from being swallowed up in a Dublin Parliament. Therefore, it is undoubtedly our duty and our privilege, and always will be, to see that those appointed by us possess the most unimpeachable loyalty to the King and Constitution. That is my whole object in carrying on a Protestant Government for a Protestant people. I repeat it in this House. 10. Formal national commemoration of the 1916 Uprising and/or the AngloIrish Treaty and its partition of Ireland did not emerge in mainstream ritual and pageantry until about 1966 onward. The prospect of Northern Ireland’s persistent “troubles” born out of partition were portrayed as a continued threat for possible discord and reignition of divisions that lead to the violence of the Irish Civil War. To read more on features of reticence in regard to commemoration and uncomfortable legacies of these ruptures and divisions see: Jennifer Keating and Colin MacCabe, “Our Fenian Dead,” Critical Quarterly, Volume 58, No. 1, April 2016. 11. Declan Long, Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017), 5. 12. Ibid. 13. Anna Burns, Milkman (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), 8. 14. Ibid., 9. 15. Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir Second Sex,” Yale French Studies, No. 72, 1986, 40. 16. Jules Gleeson, “Judith Butler: The Early Years,” June 19, 2019, https:// daily.jstor.org/daily-author/jules-gleeson/.

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17. Ibid. 18. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, The Art and Science of Portraiture (San Francisco, CA: Joseey-Bass, Wiley Imprint, 1997), 12. 19. Declan Long, Ghost-Haunted Land: Contemporary Art and Post-Troubles Northern Ireland (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017), xiii.

CHAPTER 2

Rita Duffy

Njaimeh Njie Rita Duffy 2022

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_2

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… he expected women to be doughty, inspirational, even mythical, supernatural figures. We were supposed also to altercate with him, more or less too, to overrule him, which was all very unusual but part of his unshakeable women rules. If a woman wasn’t being mythical and so on, he’d try to nudge things in that direction by himself becoming slightly dictatorial towards her. By this he was discomfited but had faith that once she came to with the help of his improvised despotism, she would remember who she was and indignantly reclaim her something beyond the physical once again. Ana Burns

Rita Duffy was born in Belfast on July 30, 1959. Her mother, Maura was from Clara, County Offaly, where she grew up amidst picturesque farmland and frugality. Maura was a talented Irish dancer, who was deeply connected to her family. She never missed an opportunity to visit home, after marriage precipitated a permanent move across the border. Duffy’s father, John, was a West Belfast man. Throughout the Second World War and thereafter, he cleverly navigated the city’s deep sectarian discrimination with grace. He provided for the family with an air of humor and ingenuity. Duffy’s birth fell squarely in the middle of the family. She has an older brother, Patrick, born in 1955 and a sister, Veronica, born in 1957. Her youngest sister, Oonagh, was born in 1961. Duffy came of age adjacent to Belfast’s Botanic Gardens. She lived in an aspirational working-class neighborhood where her early childhood memories included “the most amazing playground you could ever imagine,” the Ulster Museum. She visited countless paintings and natural wonders growing up in the Botanic neighborhood, which was also predominantly Protestant.1 Duffy’s father served in the British military as a mechanical engineer during the Second World War. He contributed to the novel “flying boats” design team that built airplanes with large cargoes that could travel great distances for the British Royal Air Force.2 Unlike many Catholic men, he had steady work after the war and access to a home outside of the council estates. He was not a professional engineer by trade but his experience in the war offered useful skills. He was “a massively creative man, a lateral thinker who had very interesting approaches to things.”3 He also deeply influenced Duffy’s development as a thinker. They shared an ability to see connections in the world that others might not see. They can translate these connections, express them and help others to make new meaning. As a child, Duffy attended primary school in the Markets area of Belfast

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city. Her mother would pack Duffy and her sister, Veronica, on to public passenger buses, shuttled off to be taught by “the nuns.”4 In addition to her studies, Duffy, like her mother, was an Irish dancer. In school she also learned Irish and played hockey and camogie. She attributes her sense of “Irishness” to her mother, and the matriarchal pull of Offaly, where aunts and her grandmother expected regular visits. They saw “my mother as living in exile in Belfast, in the Black North.” It was considered a foreign country, despite its relative proximity to the Republic. Duffy’s mother, who was considerably younger than her father, “never quite settled in Belfast. She was often homesick.” Duffy jokes that she did not realize that she and her siblings were from Belfast, and not Offaly, until late in childhood. But she “negotiated the city” handily. She moved around the urban center with relative ease. She enjoyed school and understood that it was hugely important to her parents. They were “adamant that we were all going to be educated because it was the only way to get through sectarianism.” She recounts, “School wasn’t just a place where you learnt. School was a place of insurgence. It was a place where you were really there to change society. When I was in art school I suppose my approach, my head space, was quite different than a lot of the other students who I was with.”5 And Duffy attributes this to her upbringing.

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Njaimeh Njie Rita Duffy 2022

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Growing up in Belfast city in the 1960s and 1970s was as much of an education in insurgency and political activism as anything Duffy studied in history books at school. It was a dynamic time. She recalls, one of those days when we [she and her sister] had spent our lunch [and bus] money and we were walking home through Shaftesbury Square. And there was this huge crowd of people and there was this man standing on the back of a kinda flatbed lorry, with his arms up in the air, and a megaphone and roaring and shouting. And it was a young Paisley. It was the beginning of his campaign. And a neighbor of ours, Mrs. Houston, took both of us by the hand and brought us through the crowd. And there we were in our little green uniforms, very obviously small Fenians (laughing) and she brought us onto Botanic Avenue and told us to go up home through the park … And she was a neighbor of ours so if we got locked out of the house, and our Mum wasn’t home, we’d head over to Mrs. Houston’s. I always remember she had a picture of Gandhi over the mantelpiece [in her home]. It wasn’t the Sacred Heart. We had the Sacred Heart but she had Gandhi. When I traveled in India I visited Gandhi’s grave and I thought of Mrs. Houston. But that would have been the 60s and the beginning of Paisley’s hate parade.6

In addition to the provincialism and sectarian hatred of Paisley’s politics, Belfast’s social fabric was woven with counterforces like Duffy’s neighbor, Mrs. Houston. Aware enough in that moment to protect Duffy and her sister from sectarian hatred as the mob of Paisley supporters formed, she was something of a secularist and an admirer of anti-colonial politics. Gandhi was revered in her home and in turn, Mrs. Houston encapsulated Gandhi’s sprit in the heart of a city that teetered on the cusp of sectarian warfare. Duffy took all of this in. Her psyche was shaped by the rich and dynamic features of the city and the characters who surrounded her. But she was also attuned to the perversion of sectarianism and segregation. She developed a keen awareness, and a deep suspicion, of systemic trappings of supremacy. From quite early Duffy was perceptive, driven, and inventive. The nuns would allow her to skip spelling classes to draw friezes for Easter and other holidays because of her obvious talent. They had a soft spot for something “beautiful” in their classrooms and hallways. As a result, “my spelling was a bit gippy (laugh),” she recalls. But she relished the opportunity to draw, to create something beautiful for someone else to engage. Duffy remembers paying attention to the reception that her work received even when

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she was very young. And she enjoyed the privileges afforded in recognition of this talent. The art room and the art teacher, Ms. Fern, were very “cool,” Duffy recalls. She was young, a “breath of fresh air,” and she had a cool husband. The art room was well equipped and laid a good foundation for what lay ahead. Pursuit of art and other academic interests ranging from history to English Literature were completely wrapped up in this upbringing. It was simply expected that she would succeed, regardless of what academic area she chose to focus on as a child and later, as an adolescent. Between her parents and “the nuns,” she was pushed to achieve. Duffy remembers being very sensitive “early on. I wasn’t particularly happy as a child so [drawing] was a way of retreating to a world that was less threatening.” She found refuge in her own make-believe world. And sensitivity was matched with an active imagination. She remembers being terrified by the Disney film, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, after seeing it at the cinema with her father. “The scale of the little king in the jar” had her searching under her parents’ bed for a small-scaled creature for weeks. Stories of the fairies from her grandmother in Offaly haunted her too. She remembers her maternal grandmother had a “head full of fairies.”7 She lived close to the Clara Bog, which is now a nature reserve. Her grandmother would warn her to “never ‘go near a bog hole, it’s full of dark water.’ Now [in] a bog hole, the water is black. It’s like a mirror. And she said, ‘there’s no bottom to a bog hole. Ye’d be falling forever.’ So, in a child of four’s mind, the idea of falling forever, to infinity, is quite a big concept. So, I had this sense of imagination alongside the tough stuff in Belfast.”8 In addition to sensitivity and an active imagination, Duffy is keenly intelligent. Following primary school, she matriculated at the premier St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls in West Belfast. St. Dominic’s in West Belfast was the city’s answer to St. Column’s College for boys in Derry.9 It is a top-notch academic institution, focused on graduating young people destined for excellence. Its alumni include President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Betty Williams, among others. The nuns at St. Dominic’s believed “education sets you free, not violence.” Duffy recounts, “it was deeply feminist, it was absolutely, rigorously intellectual. There was no messing around. But at the same time, it was like if you marry, then your family and your husband come first. It was like back in to the Catholic thing.” But it was a progressively forward-thinking institution too.

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They wouldn’t allow us to be taught how to use a typewriter. Because it was like, ‘you won’t be using a typewriter, girls. You’ll be the boss.’ There was the sense that you passed the Eleven Plus. You were smart. Nothing could hold you back other than yourself. They were very motivating that way. It was a sense of go out there and do the best you can and be the best you can and change society. They were also quite snobby. But in a Belfast context it was like ‘you’re up against it and the best we can do for you is to prepare you for that.’10

From her early days in school it was clear that Duffy was a force. “I had the art thing,” she recalls but “I was pushed, pushed academically … in math, in history. I studied English and history and I remember in Art College, I thought maybe I should have done English at Queens. But my sister said, ‘You’re really good at that [art]. Wouldn’t it be great to do something that you’re really good at, make your art?’ And I thought, I could make my living at this.” While academically precocious, Duffy was also industrious. Aside from skipping spelling lessons to make seasonal friezes for the nuns, Duffy worked as a babysitter and at “a bookie on Saturdays.”11 She took in the city and learned to work it for what she needed and wanted. University studies were a seeming inevitability. “The nuns had us all prepped,” she recalls after strong performances on the Ordinary-Levels and Advanced-Levels. She interviewed for a place in the Foundations Year at Ulster University in Jordanstown before matriculation in the full degree program in Belfast. In the interview two men “talked the art speak gobbledy-gook. One was not aware that speech was actually a form of communication and was tying himself in Celtic knots (laughs). I remember thinking ‘feck this, if I don’t answer this correctly then I’ll not get this right.’ So I said [to him], ‘Sorry, I’m not sure if you’ve asked me a question or made a statement there.’ And the other one started to laugh.” She was admitted to the program. But she recalls “being deeply suspicious of them after that.”12 Studying at Ulster University in the late 1970s and early 1980s was challenging. She remembers an “appallingly predatory tutor who had a thing about redheads,” and another English tutor who patted her on the head in a review and called her, “just a wee Catholic girl.”13 Patronizing tutors and a city ablaze, emboldened the clever and shrewd Duffy. She was confident in her upbringing and pedigree as a bright, talented Catholic woman. But she also understood the history of forces working against her as this confidence slowly took hold. She often drew on her father’s influence and the example of her mother’s ingenuity. She remembers stories of her father’s experiences at the end of the Second World War when he

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… was sent to Ghent and Bruges to displaced persons camps with the Red Cross. He was a total pacifist and didn’t take part in any of the fighting. Children, people, the drift of humanity when the other [concentration] camps were opened traveled to these displaced persons camps. It is something that stayed with him through the rest of his life. He had to come back to Belfast and be treated like a second-class citizen. There were funny handshakes and you were not allowed a job because you didn’t come from the right side of the house or whatever. He was a very mellow man and endured all of that. And there was a lot of suffering in that, a lot of pain. But he had a great sense of humor.14

Aware of these inheritances, of bearing witness to systemic violence and embodied traumas in continental Europe, at home, and further afield, even if they were not coded as such, stayed with Duffy. She took her education in the Art College seriously, as something of a vocation. Where the formal curricula were lacking or rife with sectarian or gendered discrimination, she made her own. She used the lessons learned from her rich academic and familial upbringing to seek out other inroads to her continued development. She was committed to the prospect of intellectual breadth, whether through formal or self-propelled education. She was politically aware and awake. She was curious. She sought parallels to the discrimination and defunct politics that she saw on the streets and in the Art College. She recounts, … if you are in the situation of the underdog, you have to be very sharp. You have that resilience that comes. I can look at the Black Lives Matter Movement [now] and I think WOW, they’re fantastic. They will overcome. That whole Civil Rights Movement inspired so much in Ulster. I spent most of my time in Art School reading African American literature. I saw so much similarity and [so many] parallels. And it was like my own curriculum … The stuff being peddled in Art School was such clap-trap, really inadequate quasi-philosophy. It was ultimately hugely boring, and meanwhile, the city around us was going up in flames. It was nonsense. You went into a gallery and it was all kind of middle class landscapes of Donegal for above the fireplace. Or in the Art in Ulster Mike Catto talks about the ‘cutting edge, the avant garde’ in Ulster. Meanwhile the Troubles started, and it was the same way that Thatcher dismissed the Troubles as a kind of squirmish. And people lived in that kinda headspace [in the Art College and Belfast] as if they were in Kent. That is the absolute colonial headspace. Even [when they] used terms like ‘the mainland’ [in reference to England] it’s like WHAT?15

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Seeking alternative ways in and perhaps out of the political quagmire of Belfast in The Troubles, Duffy used her father’s example. It is a focus on the funny, the humorous, or perhaps even more precisely in regard to her emerging practice, visual manifestations of satire and wit. These features in her work would allow Duffy to create a prolific career across media. She would primarily draw, sketch, and paint, relying on the pedigree of her Fine Art training with a Bachelor’s in Art in 1983 and a Master’s in Fine Art in 1985. But her work would cross into sculpture, public art, and community work with women’s groups and youth as well. The seeds of this work were sown in Art College but the emphasis on the absurd, the funny, and the strange would thread through the subsequent decades of her work as well. … I see humor as a very powerful thing in my work. Because, you know, humor is often considered glib or light-hearted or whatever. Sometimes laughter is great. It is the only way to actually confuse people or to put people at ease or to allow people to say what they truly want to say.16

Njaimeh Njie Rita Duffy 2022

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II. Virtues of Humor & Wit In 1856 George Eliot [pen name for Mary Ann Evans] published “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” in the Westminster Review. In this essay, she playfully waxes philosophical on distinctions between wit and humor as she writes, Humor is of earlier growth than Wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while Wit is more nearly allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humor draws its materials from situations and characteristics; Wit seizes on unexpected and complex relations. Humor is chiefly representative and descriptive; it is diffuse, and flows along without any other law than its own fantastic will; or it flits about like a will-o-the-wisp, amazing us by its whimsical transitions. Wit is brief and sudden, and sharply defined as a crystal; it does not make pictures, it is not fantastic; bit it detects an unsuspected analogy or suggests a startling or confounding inference. Every one who has had the opportunity of making the comparison will remember that the effect produced on him by some witticisms is closely akin to the effect produced on him by subtle reasoning which lays open a fallacy or absurdity, and there are persons whose delight in such reasoning always manifests itself in laughter. This affinity of Wit with ratiocination is the more obvious in proportion as the species of wit is higher and deals less with words and with superficialities than with the essential qualities of things.17

As Duffy progressed through studies at Ulster University, her refined relationship to humor, and later to visual iterations of wit and satire, allowed for an exploration of the everchanging and increasingly dangerous streets of Belfast. Akin to Eliot, she navigated a male-dominated community with a deep appreciation, and need, to see the funny. She engaged with the absurd as this early work playfully highlighted the valuable role of humor in dire and light situations alike. Like Eliot’s exploration of humor and wit in the Westminster Review, that expanded into a deeper project on the cultural and philosophical value of humor and wit in her prolific writing career, Duffy moved on her intuitive gravitation to explore the strange with humor. She leveraged the absurd to interrogate extreme features of the seemingly common features of life in Belfast. The confidence to do so was not immediate. But this emerging practice, an explicit reckoning

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with everyday Ulster, evolved into a foundational and persistent feature in her work. Where “quasi-philosophy” disappointed in the Art College curriculum, Duffy sought her own education on the familiar streets of her hometown. But the cityscape became increasingly less familiar. Segregation and sectarianism morphed into violent altercations and bombings. Gradually, home became an increasingly strange place. Her interests in painting and drawing as the primary media for a Fine Art degree, at the BA and MA levels, offered a tactile exploration of the confusing, harrowing, and at times, exciting, political climate. Humor and satire afforded a way in. But Duffy’s approach, even as a student, was not characteristic of the “layered, contradictory images that” Lippard “often found tantalizingly indirect,” in this period in Ireland. As Duffy’s paintings and drawings gravitated to various “situations and characteristics” of her explorations in Belfast, the work directly considered a society under duress, a population pushed to (and oftentimes past) the brink of civility. Duffy’s work in these years seized “on unexpected and complex relations.” But it squarely attended to the predictable and historically contentious features of the conflict outside the Ulster University doors too. In summer breaks from the university, Duffy worked in America, “gathering money” through legal migrant work as a chambermaid and as a dishwasher. She remembers a chance brush with Andy Warhol at a deli in Montauk. She saw “a shock of white hair and a very red face. It was one of those visual moments that I’ll never forget. I was standing beside a shelf of Campbells soup.” The visual moments afforded through this travel were deeply influential, well beyond the chance run-in with a legend like Warhol. They proved an invaluable complement to her studies in Ulster. Gathering money through this seasonal work, Duffy traveled to visit all of the “major collections in the United States.” This meant seeing George Bellows’ work in person and collections of the Bedlam Drawings. In addition to travels in the United States, she “made her way across Germany.” She visited collections of work by Otto Dix and George Grosz. She remembers when she saw Goya as she traveled through Europe. When she considers his influence on her thinking and practice she reflects: “There are no words because the words aren’t necessary. When I saw his war etchings, I just thought I’d come home.” These were deeply moving moments in her evolving practice and developing maturity. These were the forms of visual initiation that helped Duffy see her path take form, even in moments of doubt at Ulster University. “When I saw Daumier …

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this was stuff … this is what made me realize that I was on a particular track. And that I wasn’t a lunatic and that I wasn’t a contrary obstinate but I was looking at something of use, of value. Those were the things that blew my mind.”18 When Lippard visited Ireland, contemporaneous to Duffy’s studies and emerging practice, she “was told that sometimes this indirectness” that she saw as a frequent feature of Irish art, “was a rejection of the media’s sensationalist coverage of the Troubles.”19 While Duffy might indeed have focused on features of the lived experience that were exploited or missed by “sensationalist coverage of the Troubles,” the work was not necessarily “layered” to achieve “tantalizingly indirect” ephemera that Lippard notes in the work of other, perhaps more established, artists. Instead, Duffy’s practice explicitly explored contradictions. She was concerned with subtle commonalities and deep divisions that manifested in sectarian bigotry and armed conflict. She used her practice as a device for exploring and eventually offering comments on the features of her own complicated relationship to place. Duffy decided quite early that her studies would be enriched by staying in Belfast. She did not consider travel to England or to America for her formal education or in her early career, aside from the summer breaks for seasonal work and travel. While the decision was not necessarily articulated as such, an intuitive commitment to Belfast and the prospect of contributing to societal change through art held. “Culturally it was very important for me to be at the root,” she recalls. “Or maybe I found myself at the root of my work where I stood. It was something that I perceived at Art College but I wasn’t confident enough to call it for what it was. Remember, no one was making art that was political at that stage.” By the latter years of her undergraduate studies, the political situation in Northern Ireland continued to deteriorate in its political disfunction and seemingly endless bloodshed. The conflict continued to deepen local divisions and to capture international headlines. And artists like Duffy experimented with explicitly attending to its horror. She tested the prospect of her work’s contribution to meaningful societal change through reflection, interrogation and critique. Duffy’s studies commenced in 1979. In 1981 she recalls a tutor asking, “Why are people wearing those black armbands?” This was an English tutor who had lived in Belfast for over fifteen years, “up by the gasworks.” She remembers replying, “The second hunger striker has died.”20 But in the reply, a revelation caught hold.

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…. I wasn’t a paid up member of the Sinners [Sinn Féin] or anything. I’ve never been a member of a political party. My politics are [in] my voice, my art, ya know? But I just couldn’t believe that you could actually live somewhere, where something so intense was going on, and be so totally oblivious to it.21

The experience attuned Duffy’s steadfast relationship to place, to Belfast. And the exchange, among so many other influential experiences in this time, solidified her commitments to seeing the region throughout its fitful, slow departure from the sectarian, supremacist structures that privileged a Protestant minority.22 She remembers, I suppose I felt very motivated to be part of the change. I remember when I went to America, I worked in London and when I worked in America, all those summers in America, there was this fantastic openness to travel. But we were living somewhere where people, you know, where other people in other parts of the world knew what was going on. I remember someone in Italy said, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said Northern Ireland and he said, ‘Yeah, Bobby Sands.’ And this was a small town in southern Italy. I remember feeling kind of like we are doing something to change our society. It’s like someone from the African American community [now, BLM] and you ask them, ‘have you ever thought about moving to Geneva?’ And it’s like, ‘no, it’s not happenin’ in Geneva right now for me’ (laughs).23

Duffy’s political engagement through her art as a student at Ulster University overlapped with Lippard’s invitation to write on activist art in Ireland. In 1984, Lippard was asked to write on political art in Ireland. In 1984, Duffy was undertaking an MA at Ulster University. It was also the year that she married John D. Kelly, who worked in Belfast as an architect.24 In the early 1980s, Duffy’s work increasingly engaged aspects of gendered roles and the complex political situation in Northern Ireland. She gravitated to depictions of women, of men, and their connections and complex relationships with one another. She depicted heteronormative gendered expectations, placed upon individuals and groups in a deeply conservative culture that was also unraveling before their eyes. She attended to sexist overtones in the intimate circles of the Art College that were also echoed in lived experiences on the street:

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… Some of the paintings were all about what was going on about me. [I was] Hugely inspired by walking around the streets and making drawings … When I was doing my MA, there was a group of women from the South. We were much more politicised in the MA. I really enjoyed it more, I was hitting my stride. And I remember in the MA shows, one of my tutors from the BA said, ‘who’s this here? What fella …’ [in regard to Duffy’s exhibited work]. He immediately thought it was a fella who had done the work.25

The intersectional forces of producing politically engaged art, “socially concerned” art, conflated in this moment with the gender politics endemic to the art world then, and perhaps, even now. It was barely decipherable for the politically disengaged tutors and perhaps specific pieces were misunderstood as male-produced due to their politically overt and bold content. But as she attended to the lived experience of The Troubles, as she explored the limits and pervasive influence of misogyny, in the Art College and in Northern Ireland’s politics and culture, her practice blossomed. III. Vulnerability & Power If “art’s power is its ability to communicate what is seen – from the light on an apple to the underlying causes of world hunger – the second is control over the social and intellectual contexts in which it is distributed and interpreted,” Lippard asserts in Circa. Yet in the early 1980s, Duffy was rendered both powerful and vulnerable in the choppy cultural and political waters of Belfast and the Art College. Whether conscious or intuitive, Duffy’s work in this period embodies Fowler’s charge for the Irish artist to broaden “the narrow definitions of Nationalism and Unionism … from creating provisional solutions to a particular set of problematics.” And she does so with confidence, with poise, and courage, from a woman’s perspective and vantage point. Rather than falter, Duffy used comments and mistrust seeded in her studies at Ulster to propel her practice and to embolden her narratives. As tutors and lecturers suggested that Duffy find work as “an illustrator” or in “printmaking” after graduation, she roared in defiance with bold paintings that held up a mirror to the city and the society that pushed against her ambition as a woman, as a Catholic and as a citizen.26 Duffy recalls resisting the “thinly veiled sarcasm of a lot of the lecturers.” She remembers,

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I didn’t trust them to kind of … it didn’t feel like they were trying to encourage me. And that was kind of difficult, a difficult thing to deal with because I’d have been very sensitive and people would actually respond better in a positive environment. I mean, maybe they just didn’t like me? Maybe I was just a pain in the arse? But there just wasn’t any trust there. It’s difficult. The environment was not wholesome. There were others much more affected. There were sexual abuse cases and there [were those] who just didn’t get their exam or didn’t get their BA. They just left. It was a horrible environment … there’s probably a bit of the #METOO for a lot of academic institutions [PAUSE]. Anyway, that’s for another day.27

While discussing the toxicity of features of misogyny and discrimination might have been pushed to “another day,” attending to the features of these powerful forces and asserting a counter offensive through humor, wit, and satirical commentary, became an emblematic characteristic of her work. In paintings like Seige and Segregation Duffy presents complex renderings of life in Belfast. She exaggerates features on the faces and bodies of politically famed and anonymous figures alike. The renderings allow Duffy to play with caricature, distortion, and contortion to leverage elements of humor, horror, and farce as she explores and finds a visual voice for critique. In Segregation, dour and menacing Paisley look-alikes stand nose-to-nose at the top of the composition. They are separated by black cloaked arms, presumably of the clergy, that cascade into gnarled, taloned fingers. These masculine forces appear to keep generations of women, and their children, apart. Misery, fear, and piercing suspicion characterize Duffy’s portrayals of the women as they gaze out from either side of the divide. They share pained faces that suggest a sense of bleakness and despair. They appear in a muted though powerful color pallet.

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Rita Duffy Segregation 1989 Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 121.8 × 91.4 cm Graphite on paper. Dimensions: 29.7 × 21 cm The Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork

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Aside from a single woman in the bottom, left corner, each female figure is tight-lipped. She balances her responsibilities and charges, whether they are a feeding baby, carrying a donation box, a mop, or an adolescent child. One woman intertwines her hands, presumably in active prayer. With hands in perpetual action, always full, Duffy renders the sense of paralysis through responsibility that is palpable to the viewer in this panacea of womanhood. The unsmiling female faces are discolored from bruising, dark circles under their eyes, and throats strained under the duress of weighty responsibility and its heavy lift. A sense of a grievous toll pervades the painting on either side of the divide. The male figures, on top, are composed. They are in opposing positions. One points a finger of accusation, mouth agape. The other simply stares. They are positioned in unflinching postures, focused only on one another, despite the misery all around. Female suffering seems unremarkable to each. It is simply how things go. It is perhaps where women belong. Duffy’s depiction of such suffering, of division and its seeming irreparable conflict is a powerful exercise in Lippard’s and Fowler’s suggestive power of art. Duffy’s Segregation is akin to a visual rendering of some of the chief concerns of Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons and Domestic Violence, where the respective explorations in prose and verse consider the limits and the possibilities of Irish feminism, the power of language and how women, in particular, will square up to the forces of Irish history and culture. These works are emblematic of a particular moment in Irish and global history. The Berlin Wall has yet to fall. The Anita Hill hearings in the United States have yet to come. But Duffy’s practice embodies Burn’s protagonist’s assessment of coded gender rules in 1970s Belfast. Duffy is pushing the boundaries of: … what you could say if you were a girl to a boy, or a woman to a man, or a girl to a man, and what you were not – at least officially, least not in public, least not often – permitted to say. This was certain girls not being tolerated if it was deemed they did not defer to males, did not acknowledge the superiority of males, might even go so far as almost to contradict males, basically, the female wayward, a species insolent and far too sure of herself.28

Segregation and paintings like Belfast Gothic,29 Mother Ulster and Mother Ireland 30 introduce a lyrical narrative of interrogation and resistance to traditional female and male domestic roles in heteronormative Northern

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Ireland. These are pieces that attend to the absurdity of such rigidity and suggest the ill-effects of these prescribed behaviors. An account of the loss afforded with these forms of symbolic and literal violence, endemic to these strictures are evident in the suffering, shadowed color, and claustrophobic renderings. There are eerie echoes of Goya’s war etchings and perhaps the Bedlam Drawings that also caught Duffy’s attention in this formative time. But the paintings are in full color. They brim with the concerns and immediacy of the period’s social reckoning. In “Rita Duffy, Variations on the Theme of Separation,” Wesley Hutchinson writes, What is striking is that the violence in these paintings is always somehow contained, as if framed by the strong verticals or diagonals that cut across the canvas, forming carefully balanced geometrical shapes. Out of this apparent equilibrium of violence there emerges an impression of intense claustrophobia as the viewer looks in on two self-contained, parallel worlds inhabited by the same grotesquely deformed figures made all the more outlandish by the discrepancies of scale that are a constant feature of this early work.31

If the violence is contained, as Hutchinson suggests, it is also seemingly constant. The violence is actually structural. It moves across gendered binaries, across sectarian divisions. It is foundational to the societal structures, to the legislature, to the governance in Northern Ireland. The result of this perverse balance is two grotesque worlds. Women and men (notice the horrifically ignored or violently condemned experience of LGBTQ+ individuals in the society in this period) are grotesquely disfigured in Duffy’s rendering of this “intense claustrophobia,” this “outlandish” and “deformed” iteration of politics, and its garish influence, on the regions’ citizens. In this period Duffy enters her own chapter in female development and takes on a myriad of responsibilities as well. She marries in 1984 and her first son, Connor, was born in 1987. Her second son, Eoin, was born in 1994. This was a period of significant growth in Duffy’s practice. But it was contemporaneous to her development as a partner in marriage and as a mother as well. She remembers her “foot on the buggy,” rocking her sons as she busied her hands in the studio and with gig work.32 She sought ways to earn that coincided with her practice and allowed her to balance support for a growing family.33 It was a complex and vibrant

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time for growth and uncertainty. In her studio work, we see how Duffy begins to pluck the complex chord of self-identification. She begins to move from views of the outside world to the explicit and implicit influence of collective ideals on individual lives and identification with ritual. This comes forth in paintings like Nuptial Grooming . In the context of strictures and structures of living in a conservative society like Northern Ireland, Nuptial Grooming considers the forces and counterforces at play in the ritual of marriage. In this presentation of the toilette preparations ahead of a wedding ceremony, its torture, and its reverence, Duffy offers a meditation on the multi-generational inheritance and layered expectations wrapped up in female consent to marriage. The painting gives little indication of sectarian identification. It emphasizes, instead, the common concerns faced by women consenting to marriage in the West. In this work Duffy extends the interrogation of these structures. She positions the bride centrally, zipping or fastening her own dress. She is attended by other women in various, and comical, varieties of scale and positioning. The bride wears fine earrings, an ornate gold hair comb, embellished with pearls. A matronly figure suffers under the duress of the comb. And the attendants are a hybrid of cherubic and demonic characteristics. They are strangely small yet powerful. They wield their will over the high-stakes preparations. The bride looks directly at the observer. She is not blushing. She does not look cheerful. But she looks self-possessed, self-assured though not necessarily pleased or fully steady. She is poised, she is centered, although her feet are askew. One is shoed in a red heel and the other stands on a small stool. The bride is steady, albeit on unsound footing. As she plays with the humorous, the absurd traditions of this toilette, Duffy suggests the comic and the strange in the repetition of these rituals. She does not allow us to blindly move from one generation to the next. The central position of the bride suggests that these choices are still made with a version of willingness, an air of value. Like Butler, Duffy’s painting explores how women in Ulster might choose “to assume a certain kind of body, to live or wear one’s body a certain way” to imply a “world of already established corporeal styles.” But in Nuptial Grooming , it seems Duffy uses the various figures, from the bride to her attendees to the matron undertaking combed torture, to consider how “to choose a gender [is] to interpret received gender norms in a way that reproduces and organizes them anew.” Marriage in the 1980s and the 1990s, is not the same construct as marriage in the 1960s or in the

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1970s in Northern Ireland. Roles for women and exploring one’s relationship to these roles, as well as their rights of passage, is a “project to renew a cultural history in one’s own corporeal terms.”34 Women in The Troubles shaped features of a gender revolution. The feminist movement did not miss the region, if anything, the conflict emboldened features of women’s empowerment as the political crisis left no aspect of society or culture untouched. In paintings like this, and a myriad of others, Duffy shows how caricature, scale, and exaggeration feature in an interrogation of “received” and reproduced gender norms. IV. Prolific Practice Duffy’s practice is prolific. She has produced a staggering profile since her first exhibition in the late 1980s. Her work is held in the permanent collection of her childhood playground, the Ulster Museum. It is also held at the National Gallery in Dublin, the Crawford Gallery of Art in Cork, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Imperial War Museum in London, Wolverhampton Museum in Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and in many other public and private collections. She has worked on scaled projects like Drawing the Blinds at the Divis Flats in Belfast, where portraits on linen were posted in windows of the notorious first public housing apartment block in Northern Ireland. She also installed Dreams, a Belfast display that includes 40 portraits of children with etchings of their respective dreams of possible futures.35 She caught national and international attention with her 2005 exhibition at the Ulster Museum, Contemplating an Iceberg . In The Guardian’s “Artist to Tow Iceberg From Arctic to Belfast,” she states, A huge big mountain of ice seems to be the most eloquent way of describing where we are. There is a certain type of madness in Northern Ireland society, a denial of what has happened to us. Maybe it’s time to come out of denial and confront what has sunk us … The iceberg is a figure of fear and I hope its melting will have a cathartic effect. Ice is the alchemic opposite of the fire of hatred and sectarianism, mistrust and dislike, that has burned here.36

The scale and range of her work across media is staggering. She has worked extensively with the Northern Irish Arts Council on youth and community-based practice. In Outposts , a stunning series of paintings of the outposts that dotted the Northern Ireland–Republic of Ireland

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border, she worked with recently decommissioned IRA leadership and the British Military, to visit the militarized towers that facilitated surveillance of the population throughout the Troubles. In this series she documents the features of a militarized border, before demilitarization in keeping with mandates of the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement. The series touches on perspective, power, and vantage point as Duffy documents and imagines alternative relationships to these historically contested and ecologically significant places. The series of paintings moves from documentation of the structures and the technological kit that allowed the British Military to control movement across the border to ethereal connotations of the walled towers from the Cromwellian period that open up to celestial possibilities. The highly sophisticated CCTV cameras and antenna that network surveillance data give way to towers whose tops open to beamed light reaching to the heavens in the progressive series of paintings. The movement from the technological and militarized contemporary to allusions to colonial and mythical precedents in the region, suggest a magical quality in imagining an alternative future. In accessing a past, playing with the circularity of time and Ireland’s cyclical relationship to Britain and perhaps other parts of Europe in decommissioning this border, Rita suggests a firm push against dominant narratives and received divisions. It is a poetic gesture as Duffy moves away from the structural confines of the watchtower, in the past and in the present, to the uncertain but optimistic realm of light in an imagined future. This was not a project that could have predicted, however, the train-wreck of Brexit fifteen years later. In 2013 Duffy led the Shirt Factory project in Derry as it celebrated the city’s selection as the UK City of Culture. In this multi-faceted project, Duffy and her team bear witness to the pivotal role women played in shirt manufacturing and the Northern Irish linen industry. Duffy’s work pays homage to the toll that the Troubles took on the city and its population, while also celebrating the strength and ingenuity of its female population. As Joanne Savage reported on facets of the installation in the Belfast NewsLetter, … a ‘laundry service’ as part of the project even means people can leave in shirts to be washed and pressed which will be returned to their owners with poems inside them. The women here will also make shirts of British politicians, returning them with lines from the European Convention on Human Rights sewn

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inside the collars in what is obviously an attempt to renegotiate power relations between Derry and Whitehall – this points to the legacy of Bloody Sunday, which looms lugubriously still, over the Maiden City.37

Thematic threads that were explored in rudimentary forms in her formative years were layered, and evolved into dynamic and complex modes of inquiry, as her practice matured. The infiltration of a community art practice, with features of literary collaboration, is also emblematic of parts of Duffy’s work. As another feature of Duffy’s contributions to Derry’s UK City of Culture year, she undertook a collaborative project with poet Paul Muldoon. At Sixes and Sevens combines etchings and verse to complement an original score and musical performance, at the Guildhall in Derry and the Guildhall in London. The printed work is now held at the National Gallery in Dublin.38 In addition to these regional and national collaborations and public works, Duffy has traveled to Argentina, South Africa, Norway, throughout Europe, and the United States for various lectures, residencies, and workshops. She has collaborated with mothers of the lost children in Argentina, she exhibited features of her Arts Council of Ireland 1916 Commemoration commission, Souvenir Shop, with cross-national interpretations and extensions at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh in So It Is .39 To document Duffy’s work responsibly would be a book unto itself. In this portrait, however, we focus on a few poignant recent works that embody an evolving relationship to Ireland, North & South, and its role in Europe. We also see Duffy’s focus on global relationships and her own individual considerations of issues ranging from justice to female empowerment to human rights. And we see how her relationships to humor, wit, and satire continue to evolve as well. In 2009 Duffy painted Guantanamo, Amas, Amat. In this sobering work a vibrant, orange jumpsuit hangs from a Marks & Spencer hanger. ‘My perception of the garment changed after watching images of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.’ The painting’s title was a result of a conversation the artist had with poet Paul Muldoon. It is a conscious play on the Latin conjugation of the verb ‘to love’ amo (I love), amas (you love) amat (he or she loves) – but made sinister through the association with [a U.S. military detention centre] at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.40

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The actual jumpsuit used to craft the painting are coveralls that Duffy used to cover her clothes as she worked in her studio at the former Ballyconnell Courthouse. Inhabiting the borderland in this period, working at her studio in the Republic and living in the North, she increasingly gravitated to the liminal, figurative, and literal facets of local and global communities upon this exit from Belfast. She explored the rights afforded to individuals and groups in one region versus another. Traveling across the border daily, supported and welcomed in Ballyconnell, after years of engaging her hometown in Belfast, she continued to grow and extend her thinking. She was building new relationships to place and space. The move coincided with children leaving the house for university and their own travels and adventures. Her husband, John, also moved from work as an architect for twenty years to returning to school and training to become a psychotherapist. He also published a collection of poetry. In these transitions, the past and present circled in Duffy’s work as well. These etchings of time are evident in the painting. We can see allusions to simple and complex relationships between nations, between individuals and collectives, as they hold or fall apart, locally and globally.

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Rita Duffy Guantanamo amas amat 2009 Oil on linen. Dimensions: 182 × 121 cm The Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork

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In the electric orange folds and bunches of the fabric, shadows, layers of shading, and perhaps fray from use, mute the color. The jumpsuit hangs inured, uninhabited, and seemingly innocuous. For Duffy, the coveralls protect her clothes from staining. But its color, its form, and its poetic emptiness challenge viewers to fill the image of the garment with a human body, a face, and a narrative. By 2009 the orange coveralls are associated with incarceration. They are also laden with accusations of “interrogation in depth,” propagated by the United States with captives in Guantanamo Bay and later, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Accusations of human rights violations endemic to the interrogation techniques used and justified by the US government have circulated worldwide. They also extend to their British allies, who have their own reputation for infringements on human rights. The jumpsuit is associated with the almost 800 men, women, and children incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, subjected to these techniques and held for months and years without trial.41 While the situation in Guantanamo is particular to US policy, legal maneuvering and justification in the name of security echo incidents from Ireland’s and Northern Ireland’s recent past as well. Duffy’s meditation on the orange jumpsuits invokes a legacy of abuse of power and justification of state-sponsored violence as a form of retribution in the United States and in the United Kingdom. This work alludes to complex connections and reflections on difference between the invocation of the Special Powers Act 1922 in August 1971 in Northern Ireland, initiated by Prime Minister Brian Faulkner (see in-depth discussion of these precedents in Chapter 3: Mairéad McClean) and the precedents cited by the US government to rationalize strategies for their War on Terror. In Northern Ireland the emergency measures led to the arrest of three thousand mostly Catholic men and months of uncertainty as families waited to see if internment would persist or if the incarcerated individuals would face trial in the Diplock System. The painting also might suggest connections to the Republic of Ireland’s court filing against the British Government before the European Commission on Human Rights under Article 24 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms following evidence of “enhanced interrogation” or “interrogation in depth” of 14 men in Northern Ireland in 1971 (see Chapter 3: Mairéad McClean). The empty jumpsuit allows the artifact to be open to interpretation. It is an opportunity to hang up a multitude of narratives that both separate the viewers from the incarcerated individuals that it connotes, and to

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potentially connect them, or parse them out, to consider their individual stories. Consumers will recognize the seemingly innocent and common Marks & Spencer’s logo on the hanger. It can hold the viewer accountable for our consumerist culture in the West. It might suggest our distractions and our value of material things even in the face of human rights violations. Duffy’s work asks us to pause, to consider how willingly we look away from the television screen when we see ugly practices leveraged in the name of individual or national freedoms? What consumerist distractions might we seek when we see controversy or the prospect of infringements on basic human rights? What might we do to pressure governments that make these decisions and uphold these policies in our name? The links to injustice, violence, and the political will be leveraged through violent means by terrorists and the states that they oppose are captured, as well, in the seemingly innocuous materiality of the oil paint strokes on canvas. The object, the coveralls, is rendered in oil on canvas. It is seemingly harmless. Yet its meaning is palpable, its significance is pedagogic. The 2009 painting plays with techniques that Duffy uses in other paintings in this decade as well. In 2001 she paints Relic, a fur-lined parka that is seemingly suspended in air. It hovers above a blackened abyss, not too different from the black bog holes that her maternal grandmother described in her childhood. In this work, IRA woman Mairead Farrell’s parka, named as such and crafted after Duffy saw it on display in Belfast, is distanced from the narrative of its owner. It is suspended. It is positioned as an artifact, a relic. Its materiality can have a myriad of interpretations. As Vikki Bell writes in “Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form,” Duffy’s strategy in lifting artifacts out of their immediate personal and historical context offers opportunities for individuals and groups to consider the object and its significance in and out of the past. In relation to this technique, whether Duffy focuses on an orange jumpsuit, a white handkerchief, a barrister’s wig, or a paramilitary member’s anorak, she invites a multitude of narratives and constellation points in time to suspend the stranglehold of history and momentary politics. Bell writes: By such lifting [reference to Deleuze], the contexts and all that separates them are suspended; in the art gallery, the principles that organize legal procedures are likewise rendered exterior. But not all contexts are thereby removed.42

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In the momentary suspension, Duffy offers an instance of possibility. Much like the empty jumpsuit and anorak suggest, the plight of the individual, the desperation of lashing out in violence that yields perpetuation of further violence, by an individual, by a state, inside and outside the legal binds of a particular state in a particular moment, force us to stop. We are asked to consider. The painting asks us, who loves? Do I love? Does he love? Does she love? Amo. Amas. Amat. What binds? What separates? What makes us look away? In this exercise Duffy positions the object to invoke interrogation. In the paintings exhibited in “Cuchulain Comforted” at the Millennium Court Gallery in Portadown in April 2007, Relic is exhibited with the Justus Series, depicting a variety of wigs and Cloth 1, a white linen handkerchief [a reference to the white handkerchief waved in desperate SOS by Father Daly as he sought care for the wounded on Bloody Sunday in Derry]. In this exhibition and others, she challenges her viewers to reckon the material with its variety of meanings.43 As Bell indicates, Duffy’s work challenges the viewer to consider how “legalistic mechanisms are evoked – the European Court of Human Rights on the one hand and the judicial inquiries (the Widgery Inquiry and the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday) on the other – two significant mechanisms for ‘dealing with the past’ that have been employed in Northern Ireland. In each of these fora, issues of state violence are discussed in different terms in ways that are able to supersede the state.” As such, the past ills offer inroads for holding responsible states accountable rather than offering precedent for rationalization of such violations of human dignity. In the life of the object out of its material, historical, and political context, Duffy opens the prospect of the kind of pedagogical moments that Fowler suggests are available with politically engaged art. In a similarly uncomfortable challenge to pause, to engage, to act, Duffy’s gravitation to the Bedlam Drawings in her early travels come forth in the 2020 The Emperor Has No Clothes series. This collection, recently acquired by the Crawford Gallery in Cork, came forth in the midst of global Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and social unrest and protest in the United States and across the world in response to violence on black bodies; men, women, and children, at the hands of policing forces. In these drawings, Duffy fixates on Donald Trump as monster. He is positioned in the center of each drawing, the core from which chaos and bedlam emanate. This searing critique of Trump’s xenophobic and misogynistic campaign for the American Presidential Office, and the pervasive

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strongman authoritarian form of governance that manifested in his administration, are linked directly to the social, cultural, and public health crises in 2020 and into 2021. He is not the scapegoat for these ills but he is held accountable for his role in the outsized forms of suffering for all those outside of his protected circle in the United States and worldwide. Duffy shares that the series of ten drawings were made in response to television coverage of the Trump presidency in the USA. ‘I return regularly to Goya’s War etchings, Hieronymus Bosch and Breughel, their compositions pull me into the detailed depictions of humanity. I watch Trump’s daily briefings in disbelief – a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt American subconscious dance naked on live TV.44

In the series, the bedlam ensuing from Trump’s policies and decorum render all parties vulnerable. Unbridled hate and unmitigated xenophobic and misogynistic language echo as a soundscape of soundbites that are readily imagined to punctuate the assault on the senses in the drawings. These are depictions of war, the unraveling of an ambitious society built on visions of grandeur and exceptionalism. Duffy documents the moments where it is brought to its knees by its own conceit. Allusions to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Shakespeare’s Tempest abound as the eye moves from one catastrophic detail to the next. In drawing 6, the hierarchy moves from the seemingly undaunted, bustle of everyday lives as individuals rush about their business to the authoritarian leader on top. He is naked, unabashedly playing with himself, in thinly veiled presidential decorum associated with a collar and tie. Interrogation techniques like water boarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation through hooding, and armed captivity round out the second echelon of this hell. On the third level, the gallows are manned by the Ku Klux Klan. Trump sits atop the heap of suffering, unphased, distracted, hair teased. He looks askance, distracted by his myopic vision of self-grandeur and supremacy.

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Rita Duffy The Emperor Has No Clothes 6 2020 Graphite on paper. Dimensions: 29.7 × 21 cm The Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork

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Rita Duffy The Emperor Has No Clothes 7 2020 Graphite on paper. Dimensions: 29.7 × 21 cm The Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork

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Rita Duffy The Emperor Has No Clothes 10 2020 Graphite on paper. Dimensions: 29.7 × 21 cm The Crawford Gallery of Art, Cork

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The bleakness of this reckoning in contemporary US politics and culture is overwhelming. In sketch 7, Trump plays the violin, ensconced by KKK hooded figures, fashioned out of American flags. A Covid-19 spiked virus looms in the sky, joined by a military or police helicopter. Masked black figures are held by police and armed vigilantes. George Floyd is pinned by “the police.” Duffy’s catastrophic condemnation of the “horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt American subconscious dance naked on live TV” is rendered in astounding detail. In sketch 10, she captures Trump’s presumed callousness. Perhaps not just the person, Donald Trump, but Trumpism as a movement. In the unbridled chaos that is captured in the naked bodies, Duffy suggests the mutual vulnerability and subject to suffering associated with this dangerous and volatile circus. Like the women in the 1989 painting Segregation, ill-effects of this short-sightedness are ubiquitous. No one can escape the catastrophe of this moment. Even if the plight falls primarily on Americans, the toxicity and the pathology of this illness will have outsized effects the world over. In the Emperor Has No Clothes , a sophisticated and scathing critique of authoritarian governance in the United States is rendered in searing satire. Wit and humor, as Eliot suggests, electrify features of these drawings in slightly varied timbres. They are detailed, they are unrelenting in their power, they are difficult to engage because they reflect unspeakable horror. The vulnerability of these moments, the collective wounding that comes from these social and cultural traumas, the violence on individual bodies, and shared consciousness are attended to with delicacy and force in Duffy’s practice. In another master stroke, albeit along a very different chord, Duffy also created Anatomy of Hope.45 As she spent a prestigious residency with the Long Room Hub at Trinity College primarily in lockdown in a small flat in Dublin, or in relative isolation at her cottage in Achill Island, Duffy worked steadily and without pause. She crafted an original animation, with an original score from composer Rory Pierce. It was yet another form for Duffy, moving out of static paintings, drawings, etchings, or sculpture to moving images that embody the uncertainty, the whimsy, and the prospective hope in a moment of global crisis. Unlike the bedlam and dire claustrophobia of the Emperor Has No Clothes , Anatomy of Hope greets the threat of Covid-19, and each of its political and public health crises, with optimism and strength in the face of strife. Duffy writes,

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The robust heartfelt kindness, experienced in Irish communities reassures me, all will be well. Ourselves alone, the ghost of memory flits through my head. Superstitious ribbons and St Bridget’s red rags impaled on thorns – suffering on, offering it up, enduring at all costs – doing the right thing. Amulets threaded with nostalgia plead for a better future, a borderless place both snug and wide open a doorway never needing to be closed. I want to imagine not the threat of freedom or its tentative, grasping fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness. And once again I find myself inspired by the African American struggle, and the words of James Baldwin: ‘Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.’46

Rita Duffy Anatomy of Hope 2021 Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin

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In this animation, perhaps Duffy’s practice comes full circle. She mobilizes her Fine Art technique from static meditations to a moving commentary. Regardless of where it takes her practice, it can be assured things will not stand still. In Anatomy of Hope we see features of humor, aspects of the mythical, the ancient, and the pagan that offer consolation and a sense of hope for a future. In the renderings of our anatomical vulnerability, Duffy also asserts Irish strength and resilience. She rewrites and reappropriates political republicanism with “ourselves alone,” an echo of Sinn Fein in the past and its role in contemporary politics, North and South, alike. But she appropriates it in lower-case, in her own lexicon acknowledging Irish strength without espousing Irish militance. Citing Baldwin, she suggests aspects of solidarity. Duffy pays homage to the literary mentors who carried her through and offered complex and interesting inroads to the artistic development she sought back at Ulster University. The momentum and the hope captured in the animation are not without concern. The musical score captures senses of foreboding alongside reasons for optimism, a focus on the possible. In this work and in the ongoing practice, Duffy encourages us to laugh. She challenges us to see. And she encourages us to move forward with faith, with hope, and an appreciation for the beautiful.

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Njaimeh Njie Rita Duffy 2022

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Maurice Fitzpatrick, Boys of St. Columb’s (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2010). Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. George Eliot, “German Wit: Heinrich Heine,” Westminster Review, Volume LXV, January 1856. Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. Lucy Lippard, “Activating Activist Art,” Circa, July–August 1984: 11. This was the second P-IRA Hunger Strike that resulted in 10 men striking to their death. For reference see: David Beresford’s 10 Men Dead (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987). Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. Sir James Craig, Unionist Party, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. 21 November 1934, Reported in Parliamentary Debates, Northern Ireland House of Commons, Vol. XVII, Cols. 72–73, https://cain.uls ter.ac.uk/issues/discrimination/quotes.htm. Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. Jessica Campbell, “Local Poet’s First Collection Celebrates Life Via a Studied Exploration of Loss,” Impartial Reporter, November 23, 2020. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Anna Burns, Milkman (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), 8. Belfast Gothic, 1988. Held by Northern Ireland Civil Service, acquired 1988. Mother Ireland and Mother Ulster 1988.

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31. Wesley Hutchinson, “Rita Duffy, Variations on the Theme of Separation,” Études Irlandaises, Volume 30, No. 1, 2005. 32. Interviews with Rita Duffy 2020–2022. 33. See forthcoming, Arts in Action Na hEalaíona I nGníomh: Rita Duffy, Junior Cycle for Teachers. 34. Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir Second Sex,” Yale French Studies, No. 72, 1986, 40. 35. Rita Duffy: Portrait of an Artist, BBC 2021. 36. Angelique Chrisafis, “Artist to Tow Iceberg from Arctic to Belfast,” The Guardian, March 29, 2005. 37. Joanne Savage, “Art Project Revisits Shirt-Making,” Belfast NewsLetter, Friday, June 14, 2013. See: https://theshirtfactory.tumblr.com/image/ 53266368903. 38. See http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/21192/at-sixesand-sevens. 39. See So It Is : https://mattress.org/works/the-souvenir-shop/. 40. Caption/Headstone at the Crawford Gallery Cork, Ireland. 41. Letta Taylor and Elisa Epstein, “The Costs of Unlawful US Detentions and Interrogations Post-9/11,” Human Rights Watch, January 9, 2022. 42. Vikki Bell, “Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form,” Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 10, No. 3, 2011. 43. Fionna Barber, “Rita Duffy’s Unquiet Relics,” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 37, No. ½, 2011. 44. The Crawford Gallery Cork: https://crawfordartgallery.ie/your-nationalcollection-2021/. 45. See Anatomy of Hope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp8eP8 7u3pE and. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2021/0203/1192344-the-ana tomy-of-hope-artist-rita-duffy-on-her-new-animation/. 46. Rita Duffy, “The Anatomy of Hope—Artist Rita Duffy on Her New Animation,” RTE, https://www.rte.ie/culture/2021/0203/1192344the-anatomy-of-hope-artist-rita-duffy-on-her-new-animation/. See also: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/index-ritaduffy.php.

CHAPTER 3

Mairéad McClean

Njaimeh Njie Mairéad McClean 2022

The original version of this chapter was revised: Figure caption have been updated. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_3

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I want the line up close. I want to see how the land and its people have reacted to the border, and the ways in which the line is made manifest. First it just demarcated counties, then countries and will next be where the United Kingdom and the European Union touch – this line has a lot of responsibilities. In 2016 the UK voted to disentangle itself from the EU, while the Republic of Ireland remained a committed member. It was striking how little the possible effect on Ireland was discussed in the lead-up to the referendum on EU membership. You might have thought the border between the UK and the EU was going to be the English Channel. But it won’t be, it’s here, and its thin as wire. It turns out that I will see the border in a peaceful yet fragile moment. Looking at the border will also require thinking back in time, charting its past. So far my map is just a large sheet of paper with nothing on it but the border’s crooked course and an X representing the Border Interpretive Centre. I’m not sure what else I’ll find. As a symbol the border divides, but I’m going to see what it is doing on the ground, and in the water. Garrett Carr

In 2017 The Wapping Project commissioned Mairéad McClean to film Making Her Mark, an original work that explores borders, our relationships to ecological and political landscapes, and the absurd, oftentimes futile performance of nationalism. In the catalogue essay that accompanies the work, To Step Across the Line, Kapka Kassabova recounts her own upbringing along the border of Bulgaria in the shadows of the Iron Curtain. She writes: There is something about borderlines that attracts and repels at once. As soon as a line is drawn in the sand, a desire arises to step across it. Like the need to tell stories, the need to step across the line may be hardwired in our brains. The favourite neighbourhood game of my childhood was hopscotch. All you needed was a piece of chalk. You drew a few lines on the asphalt, and you created a microcosm of meaningful boundaries. You jumped in and out, in and out, and the winner was she who didn’t stumble and lose her Balance. All my life, I have had a hyper-awareness of borders. I grew up behind the iron curtain in a country whose villages, rivers and mountains within twenty or so miles of the national border were a militarised, no-go Border Zone. This was in fact Europe’s southernmost stretch of the iron curtain, and it was ostensibly there to protect us, though – I saw this later but sensed it even as a child – its barbs were pointing inwards.1

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The push and pull of borders, and their outsized influences on individual lives on either side of their “in and out” ethos have dictated much of Mairéad McClean’s life. She passed through real and imagined borders in the countryside of County Tyrone as a child. She was aware of threats associated with societal unrest and disputed borders in the long wake of Ireland’s partition. She heard echoes of linguistic borders across Irish and English language systems and developed intimate relationships with musical borders as she played in a traditional Irish musical trio with her sisters and danced to disco with her friends. McClean has lived a lifetime attuned to the figurative and literal “lines on the asphalt.” Whether in Northern Ireland or England, Ireland or Ghana, she is acutely aware of the hopscotch lines that also loom in Kassabova’s memory.

Thomas Zanon-Larcher Making Her Mark by Mairéad McClean 2017 Production Still The Wapping Project Born August 3, 1966, McClean arrived in the middle of the pack as her parents, Annie and Patrick (Paddy Joe) McClean, raised twelve children in the small village of Beragh. Briege was born in 1963; twins Seamus and Ciaran were born in 1964; Eamon was born in 1965; Mairéad was born in 1966; twins Maura and Ailis were born in 1967; Liam was born in 1969; Orla was born in 1971; Colm was born in 1973; Aine was born in 1979; and finally, Padraig was born in 1986. It was a bustling

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and crowded household, with small and large bodies alike in motion. A cacophony of chatter, collections of small shoes, children’s drawings, and other trappings of everyday life in a large family, surrounded the quiet and often shy child. As her mother tended to the myriad and seemingly endless tasks to support a family of fourteen; washing clothes, preparing meals, assisting with homework, and steady participation in weekly mass and festivals associated with the local Catholic church; each child was raised with an appreciation for their unique role and contribution to the family. Their father, Paddy Joe, worked as a schoolteacher, a headmaster, and later as a special education practitioner. “There was always a mass to go to. And my mother, the youngest of eight, had nieces close in age who were always around to help with children,” McClean recalls.2 Despite the noise and bluster of a large and dynamic family home, she remembers being seen and valued by her parents. “Being part of a big family you want to find the things that set you out from another child. You have to find your own, something that makes you feel unique [that] sets you out as different from your brothers and sisters. My parents encouraged this in us. They would say, ‘you’re good at that,’ with encouragement. If you weren’t good at something they would not dwell on that. They would focus on the more positive things. Dad knew that from his teaching … it was very practical.”3 In the midst of this vibrance, McClean proved a capable student with her own quiet presence at school and at home. She has fond memories of St. Mary’s primary school, which “was positively Victorian by today’s standards. It was an old building with a great open school room. It was always either too hot or freezing cold.” She remembers taking turns “to go out to the shed to fill the coal shuttles. In the winter we used to dry our wet gloves on the fireguard, inevitably burning them when the stove was too hot or not drying them at all when the fire was left too long with no coal. It was very basic: we had one sink to wash our hands without hot water and there were outside toilets.”4 Although simple, McClean’s memories of her early schooling are warm. She remembers listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on a wireless radio every week for a program called “Singing Together” in Northern Ireland. All school children were given a book of songs that would sound from the radio for her class to chime in. Another scheme brought books and radio instruction on movement and dance. Despite Beragh’s remote location, about six miles from Omagh, McClean remembers a conscious connectedness to other locations and people. These notions of networks and

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connectivity were afforded through her schooling, the radio and gatherings around music and theater at local halls and festivals. Her family’s experiences across the water in England, where people went to work to guard against record unemployment numbers in the North, allowed her to imagine her own connections to other countries, especially parts of the United Kingdom. A nearby metropolis like Belfast was often discussed and understood by the children as a place within reach. This was due to her father’s teacher training at St. Joseph’s College and his activism with the socialist movement and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in Belfast and Derry. Distance and proximity, absence and presence, peace and unrest were contrasts that lived alongside one another through much of McClean’s upbringing. Education was a paramount value in the house. McClean’s mother, Annie, left school after sixth class, to help her widowed mother on their small farm about three miles from Beragh. McClean’s father, Paddy Joe, was financially supported by his local parish to attend St. Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh, as he showed academic promise and the prospect of a vocation as a priest. He later attended St. Joseph’s instead of seminary as training to become a teacher offered steady work and the strong possibility of returning to Beragh to raise his own family someday. Despite educational disparity in the couple, both parents emphasized the value of their children’s education. Books were a luxury in the house but there were few. Robinson Crusoe, teacher’s training books, and perhaps children’s schoolbooks were about the house, but with little spare cash the local public library was the central resource to support the family’s value of literacy and academic achievement. “Back then I wasn’t a great reader,” McClean recounts. “My sisters would go to the library [but] I found them [books] boring as hell. I had difficulty reading because I was slightly dyslexic. I was bad at spelling and I was scolded by teachers so I lost confidence and interest. Maybe that is why I was drawing and getting more into drawing” in those younger years. “Reading came later, maybe not until about seventeen or eighteen when for some bizarre reason I wanted to study English.” But back then, “I did love to draw and I was a bit of a dreamer, really.”5 Despite a low-level aversion to reading, McClean was a capable student. She scored well on the Eleven-Plus exams and matriculated at the Loreto Grammar School in Omagh. Her twin sisters, Maura and Ailis, were also in the same class until she began A-levels. In these early years she often turned to drawing as an outlet and as a means to differentiate herself from her siblings. “I think I drew for myself,” she recounts. “I remember very clearly the times that I was praised. I have very strong

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memories of that.” Her parents recognized this as well. McClean’s father was the headmaster of a country school until 1969 when it was closed due to too many schools in the small district. He then moved to a position where he visited different schools in the area to assist pupils with special education needs. He would ask McClean to “illustrate the stories that the children would tell him.” In addition, Annie, adept with the sewing machine, would bring McClean in to help with sewing projects to build tactile and creative skill. “There were lots of creative things going on in the house,” she recalls. “The other thing in the house was music. Dad could not sing a note but he had a great appreciation for music. Mum had a lovely singing voice and her mother played the accordion. As children we all went to classes to learn Irish music. I started with the violin, then moved to the mandolin and finally the accordion. My older sister Briege and I also attended more formal piano lessons for a couple of years.”6 While she did not find her own singing voice until later years when she also learned to play the guitar, a quiet confidence was emerging for McClean. The various outlets for creative expression would come to serve her readily as an emerging artist across media in the years to come. II. Emergency

Mairéad McClean Russia Project 1987 Middlesex University

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In the midst of a simple but bustling McClean household, forces outside of the home would wreak havoc on key moments of Mairéad’s upbringing. In August 1971, when she was five years old, Paddy Joe McClean was arrested by the British military for suspected involvement in subversive activity. Under the invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, launched Operation Demetrius. This operation, undertaken by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British Military, led to the arrest of hundreds of men who were suspected of involvement in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Their arrest and subsequent internment was officially justified in the name of safety and a potential return to what Faulkner described as civil society. These policy decisions, aimed to undermine civil agitation throughout Northern Ireland that challenged Unionist supremacy, would serve as a trauma with long, tangled tendrils for the McClean family. This extended from the period of Mairéad’s father’s internment without trial from August 9, 1971 to May 9, 1972, into the decades that followed as well. Almost 3,000 men were arrested in this period. 700 would remain interned without trail.7 At the time of his arrest in August 1971, Mr. McClean was a socialist, a member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and an Irish language and music enthusiast. His political views were regarded as subversive as they challenged the privilege of the ruling Unionist class and its capitalist values. As an activist in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association he publicly and peacefully agitated to achieve demands like: ● One man, one vote in local government elections ● Votes at 18 in both local government and parliamentary franchise ● An independent Boundary Commission to draw up fair electoral boundaries ● A compulsory points system for housing ● Administrative machinery to remedy local government grievances ● Legislation which would outlaw discrimination, especially in employment ● The abolition of the Special Powers Act and the disbandment of the ‘B’ Specials.8 He joined sustained public protests in Northern Ireland, modeled after civil disobedience in the United States, South Africa, and other societies reckoning with systemic discrimination and citizens’ uneven access

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to democratic representation. In Northern Ireland much of this agitation cascaded into standoffs with the RUC, the British Military, and the B-Specials.9 The steady escalation of tensions resulted in a society on the precipice of chaos. The Northern Irish political system, built to privilege a Protestant Unionist majority, was on the brink of destruction. A full indication of the state of this emergency came with direct rule of Northern Ireland from Westminster in 1972.10 In 1971 the emergency was rife, but not quite complete. Before his arrest in 1971, Mr. McClean was subjected to internment without trial in the 1950s as well. In this invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act the Northern Irish Government interned individuals suspected of involvement in the IRA Border Campaign. With the invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act the Northern Irish government sought to identify and punish a very small number of volunteers who had bombed strategic targets along the hard and militarized border that separated Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland. This was a direct legacy of Ireland’s partition in 1921. The invocation allowed the British government to arrest and hold individuals without trial in the name of security and civility. In the 1950s and again in 1971, The UK government lodged a derogation to Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, pertaining to the right to liberty and security, when internment was introduced in Northern Ireland. The Secretary General of the European Commission was again informed of the government’s decision to intern in 1971 – the British government argued that indefinite detention was ‘strictly required’ because of exigencies of the situation.11

In the 1950s and again in 1971, Mr. McClean was targeted due to his political and cultural activism. Although he was arrested due to suspected involvement in an illegal organization, he was never a member of the IRA or the Provisional IRA. In the 1950s, his arrest followed local events where, a small group made this incursion across the border and blew up a control tower and [made] a raid on the barracks in Omagh. It was a very brazen attempt to incite. So, the Northern Irish government decided to come down very heavy on anyone who might know anything on a local level. They did a swoop just before Christmas in December 1956. And Dad had just returned from teaching in Enniskillen. When he arrived home they

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were waiting for him and another local man. Because he would not sign a letter saying that he hadn’t been involved, insisting that the group he was involved in was not a banned group, they held him.12

When it was clear that Mr. McClean was not a volunteer for the IRA but that he was a member of a politically subversive organization he was asked to sign a declaration of his involvement in an illegal organization. In the tumult of the border campaign the political organization in which he was a member was added to a list of illegal organizations after the invocation of the Special Powers Act and the round-up of those suspected of involvement in illegal activity. When Mr. McClean refused to sign the document declaring his involvement in an illegal organization when his organization was declared illegal after his arrest, he was forced to serve an indeterminate amount of time interned without trial. He was released four years later. Mr. McClean’s internment in the 1950s led to a delay in his marriage to Annie and the prospect of starting a family, gainful employment, and the other features of establishing a professional and personal life. Four years of his life. He was a very good GAA footballer, he had played as a minor for the County. And he couldn’t play football anymore by the time he came out. He and Mum saw each other only occasionally over those four years and they had just gotten engaged before he was arrested so they couldn’t get married or start their family until those four years were up. And yet, he never looked at it like that. He did not want to see it as a waste. He always told us very funny stories about his time in Crumlin Road (jail). He saw it like a Further Education College. I kind of thought everyone’s family had a father in jail.13

His second arrest, and subsequent internment in 1971, was perhaps due to his prior internment or due to the woefully out-of-date and otherwise faulty intelligence that led to the unnecessary arrest of hundreds of men throughout Northern Ireland. The full facts have never been disclosed to him or his family by the authorities. Nonetheless in August of 1971, Mr. McClean was forcibly removed from his home in front of his wife and seven children, including Mairéad. She is not convinced of the accuracy of her memories of that night. She is unsure of whether her memories

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are her own, or if the memories are grafted with stories from her siblings’ memories. Or perhaps her mother’s telling or her father’s retelling of their experiences that night? She does have some memory, however: Mum asked, ‘do you remember the night that your father was taken?’ I said, ‘I don’t know if I do? She says, ‘you probably don’t.’ By which she was probably saying, ‘I hope you don’t’ (light laugh). But I do have a vague memory but I’m not sure if it’s my own memory or my elder sister’s. She remembers it much more clearly and my older brothers too, so it could be their memory. I wonder if I have their memory? Also, Dad has given interviews and has described the arrest: the police knocking at the door, no, the army knocking at the door, coming up the stairs, shouting. Them pulling him down, my mother pulling him back up the stairs. They allow him to put his clothes on. And all the children coming out of the bedrooms because they hear the noise. I have a feeling that I heard the banging, the memory of being downstairs in a bunk bed. Dad always said he thought he wasn’t going to be held very long. He believed he would get home straight away because they had no reason to hold him. But that wasn’t to be.14,15

Regardless of who holds the memories that might capture the entirety of Mr. McClean’s ordeal, the trauma of his removal from his home, the uncertainty of his whereabouts in the week following his arrest and the lack of information from the British Military and the RUC for Mrs. McClean and her children, caused a rupture with longstanding effects for the family. This was a singular experience for the McClean family. But countless others also shared aspects of this violence in its myriad of reverberations in the wake of the 1971 invocation of the Special Powers Act and its subsequent disastrous effects.

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Mairéad McClean No More 2014 MAC International Prize Recipient Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin McClean does remember that her mother was “in a state.”16 With seven children at home and an eighth child born during her husband’s internment, Mrs. McClean faced the daunting challenges of caring for her family without her partner and his ability to earn for the family’s care. To add insult to injury, in the period where Mrs. McClean was not privy to her husband’s location in the aftermath of his abrupt removal from their home, Paddy Joe was subjected to an experimental set of interrogation procedures. These tactics were initially described as “deep interrogation” or “interrogation in depth.” They included: ● ● ● ●

Sensory deprivation (hooding [and] subjection to white noise) Sleep deprivation Stress postures Reduced diet (restricted food and drink)

Together with eleven other men, Mr. McClean was spirited away by the RUC and the British Military to a secret site, later to be identified as

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Ballykelly Air Base. Prior to this novel combined use of these strategies, in tandem with interviews/interrogation of the subject, within British Army training protocol, it was well recognized that these techniques, when used in combination, could make a suspect more malleable to questioning. Furthermore, it was understood, prior to the Northern Ireland operation, that such a systematic psychological attack could result in psychotic episodes, overwhelming pressure, and mental breakdown. Some of the techniques were used in isolation during colonial counter-insurgency encounters (such as in Brune, Swaziland, Kenya and Malaya), and were subsequently refined and implemented as a system in Aden, Oman, and Muscat.17

In the case of Paddy Joe’s experience in custody, the interrogation was paired with another form of terror. In the week following his arrest, when Annie did not know the location or the status of her husband’s well-being, Paddy Joe was subjected to an elaborate “helicopter deception plan” in his travels between Belfast and Ballykelly: When the ‘hooded men’ were being transported by helicopter to Ballykelly, detours were taken so that the total flying time amounted to 1.5 hours, with a stop for refueling, at which point an English voice would comment on refueling so that the helicopter could ‘go across the water.’ RAF officers tasked with ferrying men from Ballykelly to Belfast prison were specifically told ‘not to divulge what they saw and to forget it as soon as their work was complete.18

McClean recounts this chaotic period from the vantage point of the family home. Nobody knew where he was for a full week. He totally disappeared off of the face of the earth. And everyone was calling. We couldn’t find him. And that was because he was taken somewhere else. To an unknown destination. About a week in my poor mother was out of her mind. Then, just like that, he was back and in the hospital on the Crumlin Road [ jail in Belfast]. That is where he was after being thrown from a low flying helicopter. The torture was over. It changed all the men’s lives forever, there’s no doubt about that. Look historically at what they [the British Government] were doing in other parts of the world and how they treated people throughout Africa, and in particular, in Kenya. They were using sophisticated methods, tried and tested, and they knew it would deliver a short, sharp shock.19

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The novel combination of using these techniques would lead the Republic of Ireland to file a case against the British Government with the European Commission on Human Rights under Article 24 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In subsequent years, the report was transmitted to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on February 9, 1976 and then submitted to the Court “to consider the report of the Commission and to confirm the opinion of the Commission that breaches of the Convention have occurred and also to consider the claims of the applicant Government with regard to other alleged breaches and to make a finding a breach of the Convention where the Court is satisfied that a breach has occurred.”20 Each of these steps occurred after evidence of these breaches were gathered, testimony of what was endured by 12 men in August 1971, and a further 2 in October 1971. The groups were later dubbed with a precise but dubious name, “The Hooded Men.”

Mairéad McClean No More 2014 MAC International Prize Recipient Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

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Swept up in the wake of her father’s story and the tumultuous historic and political context of 1971 and the years that followed, McClean was slowly growing up. Despite the specter of her father’s internment and the challenges of its aftermath in his release in May 1972, the McClean family continued to grow. Mr. McClean was the first of the “Hooded Men” to file a civil grievance with the British Government. In 1975 the British Government acknowledged ill-treatment with a court-settled compensation for harm caused at the rate of £14,000.21 This allocation led the family to move to a more spacious home, away from the memories of the night that he was “lifted.” But the civil settlement would not be the end of this chapter in their lives. The new home, however, offered another start for the McClean family. In each home, regardless of limited space, each child was given their own place to cultivate individual interests and talents. My sisters did their homework on a table in our shared bedroom. I had the idea to set up a table in a small cupboard just off the bedroom. It was a walk-in wardrobe [space] with enough room for a table in there. I really wanted my own little room, even though it was a cupboard, and that is where I spent my time, doing my homework, drawing in sketch books and writing.22

Relishing a “Room of One’s Own” and opportunities to pursue further education at Loreto Grammar School, McClean was finding her own talents and calling.23 While still studying at the Convent, Master and Mrs. O’Neill offered a basic introduction to art. They brought McClean and her classmates in contact with anything that held their own attention, “whatever the teacher themselves had an interest in.” She recalls, The encouragement that I received was mostly from my art teachers at the convent. They helped me decide to study art. I was about 15. I remember one particular occasion when I decided to go outside our village to draw it from a hill. I made a rough sketch and then worked on it at home. Master O’Neill was a quiet man. He had a big, dark beard and glasses. In class he asked all the girls to get our sketch books out. He walked past each girl looking at what they had drawn. When he stopped at my book he lifted it up and showed it to the class and said ‘This is what you need to be doing more of girls.’ I don’t know why I remember this so clearly but I’ve never forgotten it and I am sure he would not remember it if I told him. But

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for me, that was it. I just wanted to keep going. I loved working on my art for my O-Level [Ordinary-Level].24

Preparation for the later Advanced-Levels [A-Levels] offered McClean a strong foundation in art history and a rudimentary practice. “My ALevel teacher, Winnie Winters (nee McGarrity) had been to art college in Belfast (as opposed to teacher training college) so her approach was different. She gave me a better sense of what it meant to be an artist. She had the students do big, large-scale drawings on boards and paint with oil paints, whereas previously we had only been using watercolors, largely producing still life.” Despite political tumult and the complications of her family’s experience during The Troubles, McClean has clear and positive memories of this period. She has stored still life drawings from this time. She has even played with an idea for a future show where artists are asked to bring forward still life drawings from their O/A-Level preparation. She muses “because there is much to be learnt about place and environment in what teenage girls drew at that time.” For McClean, her collection of still life drawings reflects her busy late-childhood home. Sketches of children’s shoes, “because there were lots of little children.” Drawings of a hair dryer, a Hoover, a violin. These were the “things that I had around me. I look back on those drawings and I can really feel that time. Just as if I am there.” Her choice of subjects for the A-Levels included History of Art and English Literature. The coordination of how history and practice could come together started to gel even then. “We started with pre-Renaissance and up and through Renaissance. We studied all of the major art movements. I never really thought about it but we were certainly connecting what I was doing [in Art] with some kind of historical approach … I think that really stood me in good stead.”25 The study of Art at the A-Level was the period where McClean also found a community. A privilege for the advanced students at Loreto was access to the Art Rooms: Anytime there wasn’t a time-tabled class we could go in and just hang. It gave me a sense of being in a studio. Out of all the A-Level subjects I spent more time on my Art because I had the opportunity to be in there with the smell of the paints and the more informal approach to learning. We would sit and read or work on a piece that we were developing. It was really beneficial. I could not have made any large pieces at home. There just wouldn’t have been the space.26

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In addition to these formal educational pursuits, McClean explored parts of the world a bit too. Just before beginning the A-Level courses, she spent a summer in the Isle-of-Man working as a chamber maid at a hotel. She wanted to make her own money and as room and board accompanied the job, she traveled to work with her friend. She recounts that she wanted to “make some money to buy a camera and obviously [to] buy some clothes.” McClean and her twin sisters also had a “little trio” in those years in Beragh. They would perform traditional Irish music in concerts at the local halls. She remembers, “we were always so nervous, I can still feel the nerves! It was mostly trad [traditional Irish music] … but we were also into different musical trends [too], disco / indi music, etc.”27 Film entered her life in this period as well. As her older sister studied at Ulster University in Belfast she worked at the Queen’s University theater to support herself. When she returned to Beragh at breaks, she regaled McClean with stories about her time there and helped to expose her to film makers like Hitchcock and other popular makers from the mid-tolate twentieth century. These were cultural access points more difficult for Mairéad to access in Beragh. But Briege’s stories and Mairéad’s occasional visits to Belfast offered a useful entry to the city as well. III. Belfast & Beyond With an excellent academic record, McClean was well-positioned to pursue university study. Her older sister, pursuing studies in Speech Pathology at Ulster University, offered a familial bridge as she imagined study away from home. She was keen to attend an art college in London but all students from Northern Ireland who pursued an Arts degree were required to apply to Ulster University in Belfast, in addition to other schools of interest. If a student gained admission to the Belfast campus, however, they were required to attend for at least the Foundations Year to qualify for funding. If they did not gain admission to Ulster University in Belfast, then they could pursue studies elsewhere with state funding for Foundations Year and beyond. The highly capable McClean readily gained admission to study in Belfast. It was an auspicious beginning to her formal higher education in Art. Her older sister Briege finished studies just before McClean matriculated and she subsequently moved to Stockon on Tees in the north of England. In the first week of McClean’s studies, her mother, Annie, was involved in a dangerous car accident in Omagh where her vehicle was struck by a British Army jeep. She was 49 years

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old and she was hospitalized in Belfast due to serious injuries from the collision. She had just learned, a few weeks earlier, that she was pregnant with her 12th child. In the first three months at Art College in Belfast, I spent every lunchtime or evening going to see Mum [Annie]. It was quite traumatic and quite difficult. Her injuries were extensive. She would not have recovered as quickly as she did if she had not been pregnant. My sister Ailis, who was supposed to go to Queens University that year, took a year out and stayed at home to help Dad with the younger children.28

Despite the challenging start to studies in Belfast, including the disappointment and concern associated with studying at Ulster University, McClean made a path. But it was not simple, straightforward, or without its own bumps along the way. Although Belfast was always within literal and figurative reach throughout her childhood, the city had changed. It had been wracked by almost two decades of civil violence, political crisis, and a constant and rather sinister British military occupation paired with paramilitary agitation. I came from a village to a city. I felt like a country girl. There were young, trendy students everywhere. I wasn’t sure I fitted in. This was 1985 so Belfast still had security gates around the city centre. I had to walk around the outskirts of the city if the gates were closed.29 And there wasn’t really anything going on. The Connor Hall (the art college main hall) had events on a Friday evening. Queen’s [University] had a student union but everyone there just drank and I hated that. It was just stupid so I never went there. The pubs had security cages at the front, which were grilled and barred. You had to ask to gain entry, which was off putting to a young student. Our student digs were robbed in the first month of being there. It was trashed – eggs smashed on the walls, anything of value was taken. It was horrendous. We were living in a street in the University area but we were in the end house that led to a nationalist stronghold … and it was just dodgy.30

While the social aspects of the Foundation Year were fairly bleak, Belfast did deliver in some ways. “I got a lot out of the Foundation,” McClean recalls. There were not many tutors, and very few women in the program. As far as female Art tutors were concerned, there were none in McClean’s Foundation Year. Most tutors were from England. Perhaps due to the

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Troubles most Irish artists who could go elsewhere, went elsewhere. Many tutors came to Belfast from Northern England and throughout Scotland. By and large they traveled to Northern Ireland to teach but not to engage with the political reality outside of the lecture hall or studio walls. McClean recalls in that year of study: I got really into life drawing and working with large collages. I’d use the backs of billboard posters without the images. Once I gained a bit of confidence, I started to talk a lot to the Fine Art tutors. The first semester was about taking different blocks such as 3-D design, print, etc. So it wasn’t until I had the chance to take the Fine Art block that I found my niche. I also enjoyed photography. It wasn’t considered Fine Art then, it was about teaching you to be proficient in taking and developing photographs. But I really enjoyed it.31

McClean’s enjoyment grew into accomplishment. Based on her development and skill building in collage and photography, a tutor encouraged McClean to apply to Middlesex University in London for a BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree. A few recent Ulster University art students had gained admission after completion of the Foundation Year. So, McClean took the chance and applied. She was accepted for the degree program. London was familiar after two summers (one before the Foundation Year and one after) working as a chambermaid in the city. It was time to leave Northern Ireland to pursue her own dreams. She had a budding romance with “a young guy I was going out with who lived in London” and an opportunity to see what would come from a little time on her own. Middlesex, in different ways from Ulster University in Belfast, offered a slow start. “There didn’t seem to be much guidance. In Belfast it had been more structured. So, I felt like I was starting from scratch at Middlesex.” Her tutor, a print maker from the North of England smoked “so many rollies his beard had gone yellow.” McClean recounts, “I didn’t know what kind of work I wanted to make. I remember him asking, ‘is this about the difference between being from the city or the country?’ Maybe? I just didn’t know. I was scratching around.” Unsure of where to turn, McClean remembers happening upon “not military books but books celebrating Englishness. The Queen on her horse and such so I started to work with these, manipulating the image to produce simple, photocopied collages.” Shortly thereafter, Patrick Keiller,32 a filmmaker, became McClean’s tutor from 1987 to 1988. He offered guidance as he

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was inclined to actually encourage his students to be ambitious. This was a valuable learning experience as it helped McClean to find a conceptual and practical foothold in her developing practice. “We would just talk about stuff. He had been trained as an architect before he became a filmmaker and he was a very political person, a politically interested person. And he was really interested in learning about my background and my experience growing up in Northern Ireland. He really helped me to think about the place [that] I grew up in.” Reticent of developing a practice that would rely on the drama and sensationalism of work on Northern Ireland, a territory readily exploited by mainstream media, McClean was reluctant to access her upbringing in Beragh, or her family’s history with the political realities of the Troubles, in her own work.33 “Growing up in Northern Ireland, I was resistant to the idea of bringing the place into my work. I felt it could be easily manipulated and the Troubles were going on so I thought it might be expected of me or perhaps it [or I was afraid that others might think it] was understood, as the only thing I should do. I was more aware of how people were seeing it from abroad, and conscious of being labeled or pigeonholed.”34 Like Lippard suggests in her critical work on activist art in Ireland (see Chapter 1: Women’s Work?), McClean articulates how she entered the space in “an oblique” fashion. “Background was [a way] of getting into it. It was working with Keiller, through his encouragement and understanding that allowed me to open up a little bit more.”35 Keiller’s own relationship to the politics of place and the affordances of allowing the personal narrative to enter artistic practice offered new possibilities for McClean. He suggested potential inroads to access authentic and powerful exploration in her evolving practice. These strategies would come to develop into deliberate and slowly emerging expressions, in McClean’s own style and on her own terms. IV. Power Negotiations McClean’s Baccalaureate project at Middlesex explored perspective and vantage point, setting a tone for threads of inquiry and explorations of the negotiations and exploitations of power in the West and the East. During her undergraduate studies, her father was invited to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as part of an Irish labor/trade Union delegation. An ever-devoted father, he asked Mairéad what she might like as a souvenir. She asked for postcards. Soviet Republic postcards, Communist

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Party posters, and the like were the treasure trove of cultural artifacts that Paddy Joe ferried back to Northern Ireland for his daughter. McClean used a collection of these works as the baseline for a set of interventions, framings, and inquiries that opened up a new vein of expression for a tentative yet tenacious thesis project. “Each postcard had a monument. I looked closely, with a camera, and in behind those monuments, I found people. Tiny, little pixelated people. I made a series of moving image sequences with slide film and projected them with a soundtrack. This was my way into film. I was moving still images. I wasn’t shooting images. Again, with the encouragement of my tutor, I decided to continue my fine art studies and applied for a PG dip [MFA] at the Slade School of Fine Art.”36

Mairéad McClean Russia Project 1987 Middlesex University Although it might not have registered as such at the time, McClean began a new chapter in her practice. This was a slow and steady flow of creative expression and a gradual progression of movement from oblique to explicit inquiries. With time, and across projects, her explorations shifted into critiques of negotiations of power and indeed, the injustices faced by individuals and families when a government abuses its authority.

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As she considered imagined lives in the USSR, McClean could enter the political sphere of questioning abusive governments, the use of surveillance and the monolith of nationalist agendas that impose their will on the “tiny, little pixelated people.” She could consider what it meant to live lives in the shadows of the monuments, the promises, and the myths of potent political will. By decentering the focus, moving the thesis project away from her upbringing in Northern Ireland, McClean could analyze an example of a powerful, abusive, imperial nation that did not directly implicate herself, her family or indeed, her government. She could enter the discourse of critical, politically engaged work without necessarily taking an explicit, active stance linked to home. This project was an exercise in observation and savvy exploration, it was an initiation in biting yet artful critique. The thesis was a culmination of early years of study from the A-Levels to the Foundations through the Bachelor of Arts. But McClean was now poised to inhabit a critical space in her practice. Through photography that pushed past static instantiations to moving images, soundscapes, and collage, these media reflected the fractured, agitated state of the political circumstances that McClean was keen and well-poised to consider. Still work in photography had power but she also found its limits for certain expressions. McClean was not yet technically mature so undertaking original films was a bridge too far. So, she inhabited the space in between. Her work in this period privileges the mechanics of collage as a form and moves into gestures towards the creative malleability and movement of film. She crafted a practice that gathered, brought new perspectives and points of view to the historic, familial, and public. Her arrangements offered fresh commentary and critique, and the prospect of holding perpetrators responsible for their actions, if only in the aesthetic world that she created in her practice. McClean’s work sought to amplify stories and concerns historically quieted or relegated to the unwritten annals of history. She recounts: Crossovers, tape slide sequences, etc. I was not making cinema quality films. I didn’t have the skills in that way to do that. But I could take some of the language of it and integrate it into what I was doing. Making these little narratives and these stories at that point, I was trying to tell stories in an oblique kind of way. There was a purpose to present them from a different angle. It had become quite common to think about Northern Ireland from one perspective and that was from a mainstream portrayal

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of the place as a whole. But if you grew up there during that time, you knew of lots of families who had no experience of the life that my family would have known. It was possible to live there and be quite sheltered. So, understanding the reality of living in a conflict zone versus what is portrayed by the media is important. The media portrayal of a car bomb, of the army always out on patrol, of shootings and bombings, these were happening. But for many people, they had no direct experience of this. Life at times could be relatively ‘normal,’ especially if your family were of a certain class or if you lived away from the more troubled areas. I was trying to think about this in my work. How could I open that kind of thinking space? I was making work before the Berlin Wall came down. It’s funny to think about it now, but I was thinking about the reframing of the voices of the people. I wanted to look behind the monolithic presence … to really see how people lived and how many living with constraints also found ways to live the lives that they wanted to live … Recently with the Covid pandemic when we suddenly had to start living within restrictions (lockdowns, etc.), it made me think and reflect on times when people in Northern Ireland or the Soviet Union [had their] lives changed and how they found ways to adapt.37

To imagine these everyday lives, outside of the loudest and most sensationalist headlines, was a logical and familiar exercise. It was the life that she, her mother, her siblings sought to live. Yes, Mr. McClean was wrapped up in some of the biggest stories of his time. He was a contributor to the monolith of history just as much as an individual who was subjected to its power and careless whims. But his wife, his daughters and sons, perhaps even his parents, lived their lives, pixelated by the press; its still photographs, its news reels, all in the margins, adjacent to the monumental. When he was interned by the British government the American Broadcast Company sent the news reporter, George Watson, to the family home in Co. Tyrone. Mr. McClean’s arrest, his incarceration without trial was beamed throughout the United States, and by extension, to outposts throughout the West with access to the newsreel. Mairéad and her siblings, a silenced b-roll, exhibit the affected lives for the members of the family, the everyday people, who are not necessarily telling their own story, who live their lives adjacent to the action yet are subjected to its influence and implications nonetheless. In the interview Annie McClean is asked what she and Mr. McClean discuss in her weekly 30 minute visits to the jail in Belfast. With dignity and poise she replies:

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We discuss mainly family affairs and the children. He asks about each one individually, what they do and he worries a lot about them.38

In her insistence on notions of normalcy, the seemingly benign details that are most privileged in a tightly knit family, Annie McClean impresses the value of her own everyday life. Years later, Mairéad would memorialize this value in the film, Broadcast 2016, and in the diptych, Dialogue 2021. But its spiritual origins reside in the baccalaureate project at Middlesex where the little people who uphold the USSR are front and center in McClean’s oblique reframing of values and the prospect of an alternative, although not necessarily contrary, political will. McClean’s work foregrounds the backdrop to recast it as the main event. The in-between qualities, the mining of stories that neighbor the monuments, would come to characterize much of McClean’s emerging practice from her studies at Middlesex onward. But at the Slade School of Fine Art she bolstered intuitive aspects of her practice with deeper conceptual engagement. Undertaking a program in Mixed Media, McClean was positioned to use film, photography, sound, and other forms as a means to build her skill and expression. She would gain greater technical competencies to bring her evolving vision to fruition. She was interviewed by Susan Hiller to secure a place in the program. She spent her free time in Walter Benjamin reading groups. She studied alongside Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, and other influential figures who later emerged onto the art scene. While appreciative of the opportunity to study at the Slade it was a period not without challenges. Many students were engaging deeply with critical theory and conceptual practice. Critical thinking could deepen artistic practice but it could also distract from or delay the making: In a way, it almost stopped me from making for a time. I wondered, what was the point? On reflection, at times I seemed frozen. It was difficult and I remember feeling uncomfortable, maybe even out of my depth. But overall it was a formative time and again, it gave me a sense of what it might be to live as an artist. But I did not see how I could do it. [I wondered] How was I going to live? How could I make money? I knew some who had family money to fall back on but that wasn’t my situation. If I was going to stay in London then I had to find out how I could afford to stay.39

These echoed questions did not quieten. If anything, the concerns became more immediate leading up to graduation and in the years that

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followed. Memories of this time were troubling and evident of an artist in the making. McClean recalls, “I did not like the art world. It felt like it was a clique of people in the London art world that I could not be a part of. I wasn’t a painter. I didn’t know what I was. It wasn’t formed.” She wondered, “Could I be an artist and make films?” In that period there was “no straight pathway.” Fridays at the Slade included a Fine Art History lecture. There were practice-based courses. There was a dissertation expectation too. These each pieced together facets of a growing discipline for McClean. She also made “great friends, [building] a formative part of life.” Studies at the Slade from 1989 to 1991 taught her “I must have something even if I can’t see it yet or find it.”40

Njaimeh Njie Mairéad McClean 2022 While unsure of how to live as an artist in London, McClean relied on resilience fomented from earlier periods in her life. She knew, based on her studies in London and growing up with limited means as a child, that she had to secure cheaper accommodations in London to survive and live out her practice. McClean and her sister joined a housing co-op, so “immediately our rent went way down.” This meant the prospect of

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a changing housing situation with little notice, but with the gains made in affordable housing, McClean focused on building out other aspects of living stably as an artist in London. She lived in the East of London and cycled into the city center. During her studies at Middlesex she worked at a photography stall at Camden Market. But at the Slade, she worked as an elderly care provider. She would take on temporary cleaning jobs and when they were available, workshop gigs or talks at arts colleges around the United Kingdom. Two years out of her studies at the Slade, McClean was offered a sound workshop at Sheffield University. This was her first foray in teaching, a position that she came to relish and seek more of thereafter. She did not have a studio space at the time so she worked from home. She pieced together odd jobs, working just enough to stay financially solvent while leaving enough time for her own making. With time, teaching opportunities materialized at Cheltenham School of Art in Media and Performance. After this opportunity for one year, McClean then moved to a more permanent position in the Media program at University of Greenwich. This afforded access to an editing suite and equipment in the academic year to teach students. But the facilities were available to McClean in the summer months as well, when students were scarce and instruction was light. Endurance and focus, as well as a “reasonable sense of being settled in myself” carried McClean through these years in London. From 1991 to 2014, McClean made 18 original films. She traveled to Ghana, immersed for a month in another culture, a new place in 1997. She was an Artist in Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1998. She received awards and grants from the Arts Council of England; the Arts and Humanities Research Board. She was awarded the Northern Irish Film and TV Commission Short Film Award in 2003. Her career was edging forward. She was a practicing artist, living and supporting herself through her own practice. In 2009 she married Harry Cole. And in 2012 she gave up her full-time teaching post to concentrate fully on her own art practice. For the first time since college, she rented a studio in south London to give herself the space and time to dedicate to producing work that she had considered making for several years.

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Njaimeh Njie Mairéad McClean 2022 In her Kennington studio in South London in 2013, McClean started to work with footage that she had discovered in a library while teaching in Leicester, England in the 1990s. This footage of Rhyszard Cieslak, a performer from the Growtowski Theatre Company, became the catalyst for her work with subject matter that she finally felt ready to take on. No More was produced for the Tulca Arts Festival in Galway in November of 2013. The festival theme centered on Golden Mountain by Val Connor and ran for three weeks. Feedback for McClean’s work was virtually instant. No More would offer the break and prominence that would launch a new level of practice and expression in her career. In this film, McClean returns to Northern Ireland’s societal trauma, manifest in the invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act that led to internment without trial in August 1971. It is a poetic exploration of the past, its political history, and its influence on a young child and a young family. The work interrogates literal and figurative contortions of a government abusing its power. The fifteen-minute composite of images and sound is likened to a moving collage. The rendering captures features of confusion, a sense of disorientation, and general unease particularly palpable for a viewer in the contemporary, as we bear witness to history in the making that leads

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to categorical disaster. We see the ill implications brought forth as Brian Faulkner and the British Military implement Operation Demetrius and the catastrophic effects of this monumental shift for Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom, respectively. No More comprises found footage of lead actor, Rhyszard Cieslak, demonstrating body exercises and contortions derived from hatha yoga in a Jerry Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theater training film. This footage is interspersed with video footage of Brian Falkner’s announcement of Internment Without Trial in the aftermath of Operation Dimetrius in Northern Ireland, in August 1971. These features are layered and interspersed with drawings and letters from McClean’s early childhood, including letters to her interned father and snippets from reading primers contemporaneous to her school studies at 5 years old when her father was arrested. The film opens with a steady and slow drumbeat. It is syncopated with repetitious, rhythmic hand movements as Cieslak moves in and out of an overexposed frame. There is a series of white noise, bell tolls, and spliced moments from a telephone conversation with her mother. The sound score layers her mother’s memories of her father’s absence due to his incarceration without trail at Long Kesh prison with other strangely familiar but out of context sounds. Amidst the rhythmic set of drum beats, a whistling trill, eerie sirens, and bells tolling, helicopter rotors spin and sound. Luminescent white-outs overlay the dancer’s outline, where it is difficult to determine where the bright light ends and his skin, hair, and dance clothes begin. Brian Falkner’s speech moves in and out of the visual and sound features of the work. Falkner states, in stilted, edited, and carefully delivered speech passages, a series of rationales and warnings. These are accompanied by reverse exposure of Cieslak’s training film depicting contortions, trancelike gyrations, and rhythmic, sensual choreographies that mimic an imagined fever-filled dance towards war: I have taken this serious step solely for the protection of life and the security of property. At all times I have consistently emphasised that it was not a step towards which I would be moved to make by any political clamour. Equally, I cannot now allow the prospect of any misrepresentation to deflect me from my duty to act. This is not action taken against any responsible and law-abiding section of the community. Nor is it in any way punitive or indiscriminate.

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Its benefits should be felt not least in those places where violent men exercise a certain sway by threat and intimidation on decent and responsible men and women. But we will not hesitate to take strong action against any other individuals or organisations who may present such a threat in the future. It is with understandable reluctance that one uses these exceptional powers. I ask those who would quite sincerely consider the use of internment as evil, to answer honestly this question: Is it more of an evil than to allow the perpetrators of these outrages to remain at liberty? I cannot guarantee that the action we have now taken, will bring this campaign swiftly to an end but if we endure with courage and steadiness the utter defeat of terrorism is sure.41

Lyrical drumming, fluttering, and an eventual purring effect suggest seduction and a rising fever of warlike cries to action. These meditations on Falkner’s introduction and rationalization of the invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act allow McClean to capture and explore the sense of unease, confusion, and eventual crisis faced contemporaneously in her family unit and across her community, as it became clear that Northern Ireland was headed towards unmitigated crisis. Falkner suggests he does not have a choice. He claims his operation will focus on the actions of men who “exercise a certain sway by threat and intimidation.” He suggests they force his hand, and that of the government, to bend to the fever of warlike violence. Yet the reality is that thousands, uninvolved in the political crisis of 1971, are rounded up and interned. And in some cases, the individuals who are arrested become radicalized by the very policy that was implemented in the name of “protection of life and the security of property.” Families are ripped apart. Men and women are irreparably changed. And young children are left in momentary and perpetual confusion, as they attempt to make sense of a society that is imploding all around them. As he anticipates the outcries and the accusations of infringements on human rights that are possible with an emboldened government committed to preservation of a status quo, Falkner’s remarks are chilling. When he asks if internment, “Is … more of an evil than to allow the perpetrators of these outrages to remain at liberty?” he concedes the injustice at hand. And yet, he persists. He states, “I cannot guarantee that the action we have now taken, will bring this campaign swiftly to any end but if we endure with courage and steadiness the utter defeat of terrorism

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is sure.” History teaches us his predictions are wrong. McClean’s meditation on the introduction of internment without trial and its outsized effect on her own family, are palpable, if not explicitly evident in the film. The ghostly quality of her effort to make sense of the narrative, the interweaving of childhood reading primers, the features of sensory deprivation, and other aspects of disorientation for the film’s protagonist whose reflection is evident in key shots link directly to the dizzying qualities of a society unhinged by clumsy policies and execution of literal and figurative policing. While the film is poetic and elusive in regard to its narrative, the critique is explicit. McClean’s resounding resistance to authoritarian governments is palpable. The film is deep in its conceptual and historical references yet simple and direct in its criticism. This is a treatise condemning the British government for its ill-treatment of its own citizens. This is a love letter to a father who was taken from a home, separated from his family, and demonized for his political beliefs and activism. This film is a testimony. It is the narrative of a childhood that is irreparably harmed by governmental actions. This is where the b-roll comes to life, voicing a protest. The pixelated people in McClean’s work would no longer be adjacent to the monument. They would be heard in their fully dignified, uncensored form. The message, the critique, and the gravity of the aesthetic expression that McClean offers land squarely. Its message is clear. Its brilliance is celebrated. McClean was awarded the inaugural MAC International Prize for the work in 2014. The work was acquired for the National Collection in Ireland in 2017. It is now housed at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The Irish Times reported on No More in the context of the McClean family experience in the 1970s. Aiden Dunne opens the article with: Tyrone-born Mairéad McClean is the winner of the inaugural MAC International art prize, worth £20,000. The daughter of civil rights activist Paddy-Joe McClean, Mairéad McClean’s winning work, No More, contrasts the closing of minds in the 1970s Northern Ireland with more optimistic openness elsewhere. She was chosen from an exceptionally long shortlist of 24 separate projects.42

The Guardian’s headline highlights the dual significance of the timeliness of the prize and its historical resonance: Daughter of One of Northern Ireland’s “hooded men” Wins MAC Arts Prize. The article opens:

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A daughter of one of the 14 “hooded men” the British army is accused of torturing at the start of Northern Ireland’s Troubles has turned her family’s trauma into a video that has won one of the world’s newest art prizes. In the same year as a number of the detainees subjected to white noise and death threats successfully persuaded the Irish government to take their case back to the European court of human rights, one of their children has won the first MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre) international prize.43

Although Paddy Joe McClean had settled a civil suit with the British Government in the late 1970s, questions pertaining to the British Government’s infringements on Human Rights persisted. Before 2014, pressure grew in the 2000s to revisit the European Human Rights Commission and the European Human Rights Court decisions on accusations of torture. These concerns were resurrected in part due to the US justification of using in-depth interrogation techniques in Guantanamo Bay prison, as well as the accusations of torture and abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. According to Duffy, In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration sought to reinterpret the rules surrounding detention, interrogation, and, eventually, prosecution. Embedded within a series of memoranda was now the infamous Bybee memo of 1 August 2002. Written by Jay S. Bybee, the Assistant Attorney General in the US Department of Justice, for the attention of Alberto R. Gonzales (White House counsel), the intended purpose was to provide a legal interpretation of the Convention Against Torture, which is domestically enforceable through Section 2340-2340A of the US Code. To clearly access what kind of conduct ‘might rise to the level of severe mental pain or suffering.’ Bybee referenced international decisions, paying particular attention to the Ireland v. United Kingdom judgement. In his view, other Western countries employed a high threshold when determining whether interrogation methods reached the level of torture. According to Bybee, the European system provides a useful ‘barometer of the international view of what actions amount to torture,’ and Ireland v. United Kingdom is specifically cited as the leading case in deciphering the distinction between torture and cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment. To illustrate, the memo reports that the Reagan administration relied upon this case to reach the conclusion that torture is ‘reserved in international usage for ‘extreme, deliberate and unusually cruel practices.’44

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McClean’s poetic expression in No More and the gravity of its timing, brought new resonance and attention to the issue of governmental authorities abusing their positions of power on the bodies of the individual. The film raised the specter of tolerance for systemic violence in the name of security in the past, but in the present as well. It betrayed the wishful thinking in Falkner’s suggestion that emergency use of unmitigated force could “guarantee that the utter defeat of terrorism is sure.” It also suggested that any contemporary instantiation or justification of these techniques were just as short-sighted, whether in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Cuba. In No More McClean asks the audience to consider how the use of such measures of violence corrupts the perpetrator, as well as the responsible government. She asks how a government that espouses such policies will be held responsible or accountable for such infringements on basic human rights? She asks the citizens of the countries to question the techniques, just as she asks the global community to pressure those who do not uphold basic human rights and freedoms. McClean recounts, In terms of how we see that past, we miss looking at the day-to-day importance of the personal experience over the broader political one. The relationships within a family and all of the things that are important to us all. My father’s experience of how he managed to retain a certain amount of control over the situation in the aftermath of what happened to him tells us a lot about who he was.45

Despite the restrictions of the period that McClean’s father grew up in, he leveraged what he had as a young man to pursue an education to train as a teacher, and to use that education to the benefit of others through his teaching and his political awakening and activism. It landed him interned twice under heavy legislative decrees in the exercise of emergency powers. This history, the world’s eye on Britain and the United States, as their actions abroad and at home leveraged violence on individuals and groups, citizens and foreign actors, led to a moment of scrutiny in 2014, with the backdrop of the relatively recent past. In 2014, RTE’s broadcast of The Torture Files resurrected investigations into the case of the “Hooded Men.”46 By early 2015, celebrity human rights attorney, Amal Clooney, joined the team to put the case of the “Hooded Men” before the European Court of Human Rights again.47 While the European Court declined to review the case in the aftermath of 2014, the UK Supreme Court recognized that the techniques used on Paddy Joe McClean and the 13 other named individuals

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on the case, were indeed torture in 2021.48 Mr. McClean did not live to see the UK government held publicly accountable by the UK Supreme Court for its policies and abuses in 1971, as he passed away on August 2, 2019. But Mairéad’s work memorializes the critique. She holds the UK government accountable in her film, No More. With time that very government conceded its own culpability in abusing its own citizens. And the poetic meditation on this era in her family and her community’s history, is also held in the Irish National Art Collection, the same government that initially demanded an investigation into UK abuses by the European Commission on Human Rights. The coincidence of timing or perhaps the zeitgeist of the 2014 moment, catapulted aspects of McClean’s creative career, as well as her conceptual approach. Shortly after the acclaim and professional security afforded with No More, McClean began to split her time between London and Bath. She also regularly visited family and friends in Northern Ireland and Ireland. The studio space, public recognition of monumental work like No More and new chapter in personal and career security helped McClean to thrive in a wave of productivity. Projects like Broadcast 2016, offer broader context to the political and personal experience of life in Northern Ireland in 1971 and thereafter. With a focus primarily on the matriarchal stronghold through her mother, Annie, this film offers a sense of journeying and movement, despite the reality of internment and incarceration that run counter to its movement and gathering momentum of resistance. Footage of the ABC news report that profiles her father’s story, her mother’s enduring patience as she faces the injustice of her husband’s internment in public, and the sheer longevity of his incarceration without trial, bring an international gaze to the legislative choices made in this period by the British government. In the broadcast that serves as the core of the work, McClean highlights the report before the story from Co. Tyrone and the one that quickly follows. These include a story filed on instability in Cambodia’s Phnom Penh and new evidence of political tampering in San Diego, California in the United States.49 Layered images of still family photos that include a bundle of red-headed children and their centrally positioned, poised, and ever-strong mother run counter to moving b-roll that suggests railroad or vehicle movement across a landscape of dilapidated buildings, aerial shots of the rural and urban environments and other evidence of a civil society under duress as it faces its own tensions and contradictions.

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The soundscape captures features of the interview, movements of trains over tracks and intermittent splicing of Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” with the refrain, “Gooo Sloooow.” The work offers an explicit reckoning with her mother’s experience of 1971 and its aftermath. It is a film that laments lost time, echoed in the Woodie Guthrie folk song, “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet.” In the work McClean offers a full-throated, feminized reaction to the infringement on human rights and privacy in this era. Broadcast is a testament to her mother’s strength and endurance but it is also a public documentation of what is lost despite heroic stoicism in the face of injustice. It is a shift from the oblique strategies of her Middlesex Russia project, an emergence from the poetic specters of No More, to a square testimonial complaint against the policies and procedures that commandeered her mother’s family against her individual and their collective will. The resistance is real and it will not go slow.

Marta Michalowska Mairéad McClean, on location for Making Her Mark 2017 The Wapping Project, London

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In 2018 The Wapping Project commissioned two films, Making Her Mark and A Line Was Drawn. Layering qualities of McClean’s work are evident in each but a new boundary and a playful relationship with performance and the absurd emerges in particularly poignant ways in Making Her Mark. In this film McClean portrays a female protagonist venturing across the raw, gorgeous landscape of the Outer Hebrides, subject to its wild wind, its driving rain, and ecological drama. The protagonist labors under the physical demands of carrying a comedically large pencil around the island—by hand, by bicycle, on shoulders, and such. Her mission, it seems, is to chart the land as the focus moves back and forth from the landscape to a study where another nameless, virtually faceless figure, documents borders on a map. References to colonial projects, senseless demarcation of borders that undo generations of relationships to topographical landscapes, linguistic isolation, and hybridity, as well as the incongruence of national borders to meet local histories, echo through the work. The natural landscape’s conspiratorial edge, its virtual dominance in relation to futile efforts to carve its features into unnatural parcels that carry only abstract political power, are also threaded through the work.

Mairéad McClean Making Her Mark 2018 Film Still The Wapping Project, London

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Much like the central focus on feminine power and execution of public and private political will in Broadcast, McClean’s protagonist captures elements of the complexity of female embodiment, seeming contradictions of strength and grace, as a myriad of manifestations in Making Her Mark. Her mission is futile. The performance of drawing boundaries and borders is perennially subject to erasure—the tide blows in to undo the carefully drawn border where the sea meets the sand on the beach. Raindrops fall to obscure the lines along a rocky shore, tall grass leaves no evidence of the pencil’s brush through its green and yellow leaves. Futility and absurdity, a need to endure despite the public acknowledgment of the farce of nationalist agendas in the context of Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU) with Brexit, rising populist politics in Germany and France that challenge liberal democracies and the implications to geopolitical ordering with Donald Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, all hang in the political backdrop of the work. The protagonist of Making Her Mark is not small or pixelated like the figures that initiated McClean’s critical work in Middlesex. She is in full focus, colorful and aesthetically captivating in a wild and sometimes hostile environment. But it is not clear whether her power is in her ability to endure the farcical or if there is a potentially triumphant persistence, despite her ridiculous mission. Someone in the study also holds power. Decisions are not made in the long grass or where the sea foam meets the sand. They seem to be made according to maps and other powerful devices that align only in the imagination, where representations and perceptions of execution of power greet hostile or idyllic landscapes through lived and tangible experience. Whether the pencil is indeed a joke or a powerful trope of division, power, and demarcation, remains a riddle in the work. McClean might assert it is a riddle in early twenty-first-century geopolitics and economics as well. In more recent years McClean has enjoyed further opportunity to build her practice. In 2021 she was awarded a major Artist-In-Residence position at the Trinity College Long Room in Dublin. As part of the Decade of Centenaries 2012–2023 Programme, the Irish Government has supported a range of projects. In McClean’s Beyond 22 project, she shadowed the archival team that works to virtually reconstruct the Record Treasury of Ireland. This archive was incinerated in the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War, leading to a considerable loss of historically significant records. Supported by the government scheme, McClean worked with the National Archives of Ireland to photograph and film the

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repair of parts of the archive.50 Playing with notions of memory and physical artifacts, McClean’s short film and public lectures consider how we build our relationship to individual and collective memories through the artifacts that we collect and the narratives that these hold, in small microcosmic forms, alongside the monolith of collective memory and history, in national lore and public commemoration.

Mairead McClean Here 2022 Belfast Exposed, Belfast Versions of these concerns have also emerged in her most recent solo exhibition, Here, at Belfast Exposed from October to November 2022. In this collection, archival materials from Belfast Exposed Photographic Community Workshop demarcate a relationship to the power and politics of “here,” meaning Belfast. A documentation of everyday life captured in the film rolls that were used sparingly to assemble a public record

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range from an airplane landing at the Belfast airfield to a local wedding. The smashing of these incidents onto a single roll indicates the material scarcity of this time and resourcefulness needed to document features of life in Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s. The archives also illustrate features of the infringements on everyday life experienced by those who were proximate to the conflict, including its backdrop of decades of violence and sectarian hatred. These archives are also a testament to the fervor for life and a need to “get on” with it that is emblematic of the city. Like the postcards from the USSR, the people that seem to be tangential to the historic record are in fact the narrative of record in this archive at Belfast Exposed. They are the central chord, for McClean in particular, in her exhibition, Here. The material scarcity that leads to a layering quality of everyday life that is evident in the archives offers windows and a testimony to the lived experience that did not reach regional or national headlines or the walls of national galleries. Yet these means of documentation are a part of the history of “here” nonetheless. In Here McClean moves across media to capture a sense of where the domestic meets the public.51 Used bone china, rife with cut marks, indentations, and scratches from years of use, is the material evidence of lived lives. McClean carefully renders lines across the scarred surface more prominent with black brush strokes. These highlight fissures and leverage thematics associated with lived experiences and the evident scars of time’s passage. Markings commemorate use. The China becomes a lived record of a household, evidenced in the wear of its everyday wares. The young figures depicted on the plates play on development from childhood to adolescence, Here, where we come of age. They reappear after their debut in No More. Playing again on the reign of the domestic and the manner in which the private informs our conduct in the public sphere, McClean’s most recent work insists on our collective vulnerability and communal promise. It also reminds us of our acute vulnerabilities at the hands of one another. If Making Her Mark suggests a meditation on the absurd, Here is call for pause with a focus on the real. It is an occasion to celebrate what makes a place unique, the stories and the faces that offer a place its color, its qualities, and its flavor. It is a celebration of the particular with a nod to what might be universal. As Here offers an expansive show that includes a wall of bone china plates, documenting a narrative of children coming of age, in the wonder of childhood, in the wake of adult propagated violence, it is also narrowed to a community that still has work to do. This is a region that has to come

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to terms with its own history of division, even if the hyper-local is implicated in political and economic decisions beyond its immediate power. As the United Kingdom turns away from Europe through Brexit, as it undermines features of its own Belfast Agreement, McClean reminds us the government, its citizens, and the residents of Belfast that the turning away cannot be endured. This is a peace that will not last if the residents deny the history, the story of the place. The Belfast Exposed archival materials are carefully arranged to re-tell a story of the city that has been buried in archives. It is a testament to the city’s vibrance, even in the darkest days of its conflict. McClean’s exhibition refuses silence as stories beckon to be told, again and again. The archive asks us to consider where “here” might be for each of us. McClean asks us who we are in the “here” of then and now? She asks us to consider the absurd as we bear witness to the persistence of borders and walls, partitions and parcels. And she demands that we do so on our own terms, in our own time, and in our own interpretation of “here.”

Njaimeh Njie Mairéad McClean 2022

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Notes 1. Kapka Kassabova, “To Step Across the Line” collected in To Step Across the Line (London: The Wapping Project, 2018), 8. 2. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Aiofe Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth (Oxon: Routledge of the Taylor & Frances Group, 2019), 17. 8. Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, “We Shall Overcome” … The History of Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland 1968–1978 (Northern Ireland: NICRA, 1978), https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/events/cri ghts/nicra/nicra783.htm. 9. B-Specials were a pseudo-military contingency force, called up when security was a concern in Northern Ireland and/or with the invocation of the 1922 Special Powers Act. 10. See Northern Ireland (Temporary Provisions) 1972, March 1972, https:/ /cain.ulster.ac.uk/hmso/tpa1972.htm. 11. Aiofe Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth (Oxon: Routledge of the Taylor & Frances Group, 2019), 23. 12. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Aiofe Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth (Oxon: Routledge of the Taylor & Frances Group, 2019), 27–28. Detention following an Operation Demetrius arrest was underpinned by two key regulatory frameworks: Regulation 11(2) and Regulation 12(1) of the Special Powers Act. Just to quickly reiterate, Regulation 11(2) permitted the creation of a detention order following an RUC request for Ministerial approval, and while no time limit was specified, in practice detention orders expired after 28 days. Internment was permitted under Regulation 12(1), which required Ministerial authorization to make an internment order of indefinite duration against an individual. At the outset, people served with detention orders were held at either Crumlin Road prison or on the HMS Maidstone (British Prison Ship in Belfast). After the first internment orders were signed, internees were transferred

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

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to Long Kesh in mid-September 1971 and to a camp at Milligan near Derry from January 1972 onward. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. Aiofe Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth (Oxon: Routledge of the Taylor & Frances Group, 2019), 1–2. Ibid., 64–65. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. Court (Plenary): Case of Ireland v. The United Kingdom, Judgement, https://www.law.umich.edu/facultyhome/drwcasebook/Documents/ Documents/Republic%20of%20Ireland%20v.%20United%20Kingdom.pdf Ibid., 75. With time, each of the 12 men initially subject to interrogation in depth settled for damages and costs with the British Government. Paddy McClean was the first to file a civil suit. Details include: Liam Shannon received £25,000 (January 1977); Patrick Shivers received £15,000 (February 1974); Gerald McKerr £10,000 (July 1974); Joseph Clarke (£12,500); Patrick McNally £11,250 (December 1974); James Auld £16,000 (January 1975); Michael Donnelly £11,250 (January 1975); Patrick McClean £14,000 (January 1975); Kevin Hannaway £12,000 (May 1975); Michael Montgomery £11,000 (October 1975); Brian Turley £15,000 (January 1976); Liam Rogers £11,500 (April 1976).

22. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. 23. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Harcourt, 1929). 24. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. Otherwise known as a ring of steel, the Belfast city center, where University of Ulster is located, was heavily fortified and guarded with checkpoints. These circular surrounds cut off the city center from estate inroads encircling the city and sectarian divisions rendered enclaves virtual no-go zones outside of the city center. Movement was highly regulated and every person was checked, at military checkpoints, by patrolling police and even by local paramilitary organizations.

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

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Ibid. Ibid. https://patrickkeiller.org. See: https://www.belfastexposed.org/; Northern Ireland Press Photographers Association, Out of the Darkness (Belfast: Golden Thread Gallery, 2007); Colin Graham, Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography (Belfast: Belfast Exposed and the MAC, 2013). Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ABC News broadcast March 21, 1972. Excerpts in Mairead McClean’s, Broadcast, 2016. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. Ibid. Mairéad McClean, No More, 2014. Aiden Dunne, “Mairéad McClean wins the inaugural MAC International Art Prize,” The Irish Times, October 31, 2014, https://www.irishtimes. com/culture/mairead-mcclean-wins-the-inaugural-mac-international-artprize-1.1983387. Henry McDonald, “Daughter of One of Northern Ireland’s ‘Hooded Men’ Wins MAC Arts Prize,” December 19, 2014, https://www.thegua rdian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/19/daughter-northern-ireland-hoo ded-men-wins-arts-prize-mairead-mcclean-mac-international. Aiofe Duffy, Torture and Human Rights in Northern Ireland: Interrogation in Depth (Oxon: Routledge of the Taylor & Frances Group, 2019), 11–12. Interviews with Mairead McClean throughout 2020, 2021 and early 2022. RTÉ Investigations Unit: The Torture Files, June 4, 2014. “Amal Clooney to Represent ‘Hooded Men’ in Torture Legal Case,” BBC, February 9, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-northernireland-31324053. Rita O’Reilly, “Torture of Hooded Men Recognized Five Decades On,” RTÉ, December 18, 2021. The anchor man is Howard K. Smith, one of the original ‘Ed Murrow Boys,’ who interviewed Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels in the 1940s. The reporter on the ground is George Watson who went on to become ABC’s Washington’s Bureau Chief of Staff and later Head of News of the ABC in the 1990s.

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50. https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/research/fellows/2021-22-vis iting-fellows/Mairead-McClean.php. 51. https://www.belfastexposed.org/exhibitions/here-mairead-mcclean-nor thern-ireland-internment/.

CHAPTER 4

Paula McFetridge

Njaimeh Njie Paula McFetridge 2022

The original version of this chapter was revised: Figure caption have been updated. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_4

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Place is a type of object. Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality. Neither the newborn infant nor the man who gains sight after a lifetime of blindness can immediately recognize a geometric shape such as a triangle. The triangle is at first “space,” blurred image. Recognizing the triangle requires the prior identification of corners – that is, places. A neighborhood is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space “out there.” Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space. Objects and places are centers of value. They attract or repel in finely shaded degrees. To attend to them even momentarily is to acknowledge their reality and value. The infant’s world lacks permanent objects, being dominated by fleeting impressions. How do impressions, given to us through the senses, acquire the stability of objects and places? Yi-Fu Tuan

Paula McFetridge was born in West Belfast on December 10, 1966. Her mother, Marion, was a Belfast woman, who grew up on Springfield Road. She was an avid sportswoman, a champion camogie player, and a gifted golfer. Her father, David (Dave), was a North Dublin man. He too was an accomplished sportsman. He played soccer for Home Farm in Dublin. Her parents were known for their “sporty” backgrounds.1 They played golf three to four times a week in South Belfast, where they became prominent members of the Balmoral Golf Club.2 McFetridge enjoyed some sports, but her calling was elsewhere. She deferred to her younger sisters to uphold the family’s sporting legacies. Nuala, born in 1968, was a long-term goalie for the Northern Ireland soccer team, a camogie player and All-Ireland handball champion and Gráinne, born in 1973, was a gifted runner and long-jumper, who won multiple medals for Ulster.3 Forging her own path, McFetridge pursued the arts. An early interest in the arts and performance was not an obvious start. As a child, McFetridge wrestled with a speech impediment. When she shared her ambitions to pursue the arts and performance with her primary school teacher, she was greeted with a dismissive laugh.4 Undaunted by her daughter’s challenge, Marion took matters into her own hands. She took the young McFetridge to a family friend, elocution teacher and actress, Maureen Dow. “Mummy thought we should not find a way of disguising where we were from but … she was giving us the best chance that we could [have].”5 While the elocution classes first helped the young

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McFetridge to overcome a stammer, which was particularly paralyzing on the pronunciation of “B,” “F,” and “K,” the lessons also opened up a world of possibility for the shy but quietly ambitious child.6 To this day if she “gets too excited and things lose the run of themselves,” McFetridge uses a “variety of tics” to stop it.7 But at the time, the “brilliantly, brilliantly eccentric in her own way,” Maureen Dow, brought McFetridge in contact with “poetry ... amateur drama and youth drama … I was in everything but the crib [nativity at Christmas]!”8 Poetry and performance called McFetridge to a set of interests that were distinct from her parents’ and siblings’ draw to sport. “Elocution was invaluable; it gave me confidence … and I met a different circle of friends through it,” she recalls.9 It was also one of many gifts from her mother, Marion, who McFetridge remembers as an “incredible woman.”10 Strong women ran the McFetridge household on Finaghy Road North from the beginning. In 1964, when Marion and Dave were to be married, McFetridge’s maternal grandfather fell ill. He passed away before her parents’ wedding, never to live in the bungalow he had just built for her Nanny. Upon her grandfather’s unexpected death, her parents decided to move in with Marion’s mother, Mary, to keep her company and to start their own family. “We had a very matriarchal house in that my Nanny was here, my Mummy and my two sisters. So, that very much set the tone for the house,” she recalls. “My father had seven brothers, I was the first female within the McFetridge line for something like five generations.” He adjusted to the vibrant, matriarchal vibe with ease. McFetridge recalls, “a very happy childhood.” Her days and evenings were full of activities ranging from Irish dancing to the Brigini Guides (Brownies) to the Apostolic group (crocheting/knitting) at the local chapel with her Nanny. She drove around with Marion to elocution sessions and drama, and her sisters’ sporting practices as well. Everyone, it seemed, was on the go. McFetridge attended Holy Child Primary School for two years and then moved to the newly opened, St. John the Baptist Primary School. It was within a few minutes’ walk from home. She remembers at the school’s opening when her class led the procession, as the tallest girl, she led all of the pupils in. She was a strong student who enjoyed school. Her particular strength was in mathematics. Her mother was a gifted bookkeeper who kept her father’s books in his fruit and vegetable business, as well as freelance work too. Overall, McFetridge remembers happy times in this

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intimate family. But as the Troubles brewed, her parents did what they could to protect their children. It’s funny when you look back on it. I mean, my parents really kept us away from the news. They decided that was the way to protect us, I suppose. Well, we wouldn’t have the news on in the house and stuff like that. Daddy would turn the radio off in the car. They were kind of concerned that we would be made bitter in a way, you know? And so, I really only became more political when I went to university, when I went to England.11

By and large, the tactics were effective. The McFetridge girls were not embittered or seeded with suspicion of the other. But turning down the radio and turning off the television could only serve as momentary fixes. Despite the bustle and protective wall put up by her parents, the McFetridge family would not emerge from the Troubles untouched. The family home on Finaghy Road North, adjacent to the corner of Andersonstown Road, was located in an interface area. It was a flashpoint for violence throughout decades of conflict. It was close to the barricades. McFetridge recounts, that she witnessed “a lot of stuff over the years.” … I never really talked about anything to do with what I grew up through because, I suppose, I didn’t want to be branded with that. A bomb went off in the garden when I was ten. It took the whole front half off [of] the house. We were all in the front room but we all survived … when you reflect back on it, when you’d go into school and stuff, you’d be in the middle of riots all the time. Like, I was doing my O-Levels during the Hunger Strikes. I was taken off busses during riots, patted down by soldiers on numerous occasions. We were evacuated out of the house more times than enough. But my Mum, she always said, she had three girls, so the massive thing was that there wasn’t the same pressures. If you had a family of boys [it was different]; she always felt that.12

Witnessing and experiencing facets of the conflict was interwoven with her upbringing. Perhaps there was less pressure on girls to join paramilitary organizations and young girls were less likely to be harassed or arrested by the RUC or the British Military, but navigating these features of the city, at the doorstep of the family home, was challenging nonetheless. On occasions it was frightening. And it was regularly disruptive. She remembers “36 bullets [came through] the garage door,” on one occasion. It

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happened three more times through the front window. Although the family was not particularly political, her father, a produce delivery man at the time, was shot in 1976. Someone heard his Dublin accent. He delivered fruit on the Shankill Road area [historically a Unionist stronghold but also a commercial district for the community]. He was left for dead but unbelievably, he survived. He was sitting in his fruit lorry at the back of a shop after having made a delivery, and he looked into the wee wing mirror and saw a guy pointing a gun at his head. Daddy made a run for the back door [of the shop] and the guy hunkered down and starting firing. Three went through him, two lodged in him. And the guy went up to finish him off but the gun jammed. A woman shouted out the top window, ‘Oh my God, yous have killed the fella.’ And the guy ran away. So, my Daddy has a bullet in his neck sitting along his upper spinal cord, it was just too dangerous to take [it]out. He’s now 88 and has had various x-rays over the years, you always have to tell the doctor he’s covered in shrapnel. And then he tells the story. And it’s always really weird looking at people’s reaction as Daddy always says, ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He just had the wrong accent.’ But even in saying that, Daddy would have been lifted and nearly killed numerous times because he was working on the roads as a delivery man. But the randomest people would step in to save his ass … various individuals connected with loyalist paramilitaries. Because Daddy’s line would always be, ‘If you get rid of me, there’s no other fruit people are gonna come onto this road to give you fruit and veg.’13

McFetridge does not diminish the effects of these traumatic and violent experiences. Nor does she ignore the influences they had on her upbringing. But violence and social unrest did not overshadow her affectionate care for her community and its surroundings. It did not compromise her relationship with the city. And the violence never defined her childhood. The political context was not at the forefront of her parents’ or her own identity in this period either. It was not ignored. It was acknowledged. But each member of the McFetridge family had their own strategy and rationale for getting on with it [see Chapter 3: Mairead McClean in regard to everyday lives under duress]. If things became too dangerous on Finaghy Road North, McFetridge remembers spending time with her Grandad and Granny Mac in Dublin. The family was cautious. She always felt safe, despite the bedlam surrounding

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their home, her school, and throughout the region. They were driven in their sport, in their practice and it was evident in their respective accomplishments. Dave, her father, eventually evolved his delivery business into a produce shop of his own and her sisters’ athletic accomplishments evolved into careers as a civil servant and a nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, respectively. Marion, her mother, continued on with endless energy, raising her family and maintaining her own work as a bookkeeper, despite the strangeness of these years outside of the family home. After a record of achievement at St. John the Baptist, McFetridge moved to St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls. Like Duffy [ see Chapter 3: Rita Duffy], McFetridge was conditioned for success by the pedigree and demand of the rigorous St. Dominic’s curricula. In her early years, mathematics was a primary focus and love. She scored well on the O-Levels despite the distractions and unrest in the midst of the Long Kesh Hunger Strikes [see Chapter 3: Rita Duffy]. She jokes, “Everyone talks about the St. Dominic’s mafia. It’s probably true.” Drive, persistence and focus were the practices at home and at school. She recounts, “[Mummy] dragged me to theatre when I was fourteen or fifteen because she loved it [too]. And so, various stages that I’ve gone through with my career, a lot of it was because she always made it possible.”14 At St. Dominic’s she was deeply influenced by Drama Teacher, May McHenry, where she was also cast in leading roles in Shakespeare performances. As she continued to explore her interests in performance, drama was supplemented with the circus. At about sixteen and seventeen years old, McFetridge dedicated increasing time to training, rehearsals and performance with the Belfast Community Circus School. She worked closely with its founder, Mike Moloney, who also went on to direct the Prison Arts Foundation. She recalls, “I have a really bad fear of heights so someone dared me” to try stilts. It “was higher than most of the things I had done in my life. And a really good friend of mine said, ‘c’mon, we’re going to learn how to stilt walk.’ I thought, ‘you must be joking.’”15 But within months, she was performing on stilts in multiple shows in Belfast and preparing for tours. The Community Circus was founded in work coming out of “cross-community education projects on the peace walls in North Belfast, work with Traveller communities, work with young offenders centers.”16 They ultimately built a cast of six, booking performances for children, Christmas time celebrations, and other such ventures. “You’d be doing five shows in a day,” she recalls. “It was some of the best money I had earned.”17

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While invigorating and a true calling to performance, the circus school was also a distraction from her studies. McFetridge sat twice for her ALevels. In this period, she continued to perform but she did focus on academics to ensure a viable pathway forward. She was keen to continue training as a performer, whether as an actor or in the circus. Since A-Levels did not include a course in theater, a conservatory or a university program was a crucial next step for advanced formal training. In her late teens, McFetridge spent time in the National Youth Theatre, the Lyric Youth Theatre, the Ulster Youth Theatre, Fringe Benefits, and Belon Puppet Theatre. She was well situated for advanced study and she actively sought a path to do so. In 1985, in her final year at St. Dominic’s, her parents arranged a flight to London. She prepared to audition at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). She was well-prepared for the audition. In the black darkness, she was asked to walk onto the stage where she performed her work with confidence. Thereafter she began a one-on-one interview. The tutor browsed the list of educational and performance qualifications in her application file. She asked, “Oh, now, why would someone like you want to come to London and meet loads of Protestants?” McFetridge paused. She hesitatingly replied, “Sorry?” The tutor went on to list the schools McFetridge had attended, “St., St., St. …” McFetridge answered, “Okay, listen, lots of my best friends are Protestants and I’ve been involved in drama since I was, you know, seven or eight years of age.” The tutor replied, “Well, I suppose everything in Belfast blew up completely … actually, I shouldn’t use words like that to people like you, should I?”.18 This incident of sectarian and regional discrimination was not singular. When her drama teacher, Dorothy Wiley, called Middlesex University and the Guildhall in London to coordinate interviews and auditions to schedule McFetridge’s travel to London in a single trip, she was informed that the institutions had each hit, or surpassed, their quotas for applicants from Northern Ireland for the coming year. She reflects, “Now, if that happened to me [then] that was happening to loads of people.”19 Nonetheless, the disappointment was certainly something to reckon with each time. And the humiliation of facing her parents, who were doing all in their power to support their eldest daughter’s pursuits, was agonizing. “The awful thing with something like that [the audition at LAMDA] is that you have to tell your parents about it. So, all you’re doing is sharing the humility of the awfulness. And that is just horrific, watching them trying not to react.”20 But, much like their attitude in the face of

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violence on the streets and political discord, McFetridge and her family were undaunted, within reason. Ever persistent and savvy, McFetridge landed at Dartington School of the Arts in Devon, England. This was an applied arts program where she had the opportunity to formally study theater—acting, performance, directing, production, etc. She was reluctant to leave home but she knew it was an important step towards the prospect of some advanced training in the field. And it became a massively influential learning experience. But perhaps, for all of the wrong reasons. The landscape, upon her arrival in Devon, was jarring. McFetridge was a city girl from Belfast. In her first year, she remembers feeling “a ridiculous” but still palpable, “overdose of nature.” She also admits she might have “underestimate[d] how difficult it was going to be leaving.”21 She recounts, I would always ring home from a phone box at the train station. And I would weep every time I rang home. And my mother would weep every time I hung up.22

It was difficult to leave. But it was not simply homesickness. There were deep and pervasive cultural and political disconnects for a Belfast transplant in England in this period. This was, of course, the first time that McFetridge spent extended time away from home, away from Belfast, aside from family visits to Dublin or elsewhere in Ireland. But she moved to rural England in 1986. The Troubles still held media attention worldwide, yet McFetridge faced walls of naivete and sometimes harmful ignorance. More sinister undercurrents emerged in her time away as well. I arrived in Totnes and they were a very Bohemian community, and they were talking about Nicaragua, they were talking about Southern Vietnam, they were talking about apartheid. They didn’t give a flying fuck about what was happening and had happened in Belfast. Also we would be doing our cultural … what do you call, semiotics, you know the John Berger stuff. We’d be talking about the identity of the artist. We would be talking about funding. And they didn’t even know that the way it ran in Northern Ireland was different than the way they were teaching [for the rest of the UK]. And I’d go, ‘No, the Arts Council in Northern Ireland don’t operate like that, what we have is this …’. Or we would have these community engagement models and it was like, I suddenly thought, ‘My God, that bit o’ water between England and Ireland is huge!’ So that was a shock.23

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Such disconnect frequently put McFetridge on the spot. She would have to volunteer aspects of her background that perhaps she did not wish to share. Tutors were ill-equipped to teach out of their normative, British lens. But the challenges were not just innocent naivete or provincial ignorance. More subversive, structural challenges emerged in McFetridge’s two years in Devon as well. In McFetridge’s incoming class of thirty-three at Dartington, twentyeight were women. In that group of first-year students, one student committed suicide, two suffered from bulimia and three suffered from anorexia nervosa.24 At least five students left the program. These were forms of suffering and mental health crises with which McFetridge had very little direct contact before this period. Despite the difficulties of the Troubles, in her family structure, McFetridge always felt safe. And in Belfast, she “knew the rules.”25 When she was asked about home or her experiences at home, she faced people who did not know “what to do with that bit of information. So, people you’d be with [out for drinks or a coffee], they’d be so shocked. But you then felt dreadful because they would have an emotional reaction to it that was absolutely human. And they’d be devastated for you. Or they’d be really angry for you. Or they would just do the wee lean of the head like ‘God, that’s awful what you’ve lived through.”26 The telling involved allowing new friends or acquaintances to gain access to her upbringing, and to make social connections was tiring. But the need to tell, in an effort to maintain personal safety, to fill in details when McFetridge experienced the emergence of a long-term stalker from Belfast showing up in Devon as she attempted to relay information to local police helping her in crisis, was harrowing. In the midst of this emergency she received very little help, or patience, from the police who didn’t take the longevity of the threat, and its emergence in Devon, seriously. She was not properly supported despite all she was willing to share. And this set of experiences was all within the context of other confounding incidents. McFetridge ran into ex-British soldiers who had moved to Totnes after tours in Belfast. On more than one occasion, she felt implicit or explicit intimidation when a former soldier told her, “within a street,” where she was from after overhearing her speak. Some even knew her name. Even by the end of her second year, she “didn’t really feel I had a place.” After exams in her second year, McFetridge returned home for holidays in Belfast. She reconnected with friends from drama circles, The Belfast Community Circus and other performance connections. She learned about new projects and

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companies reformulating and preparing to launch. So, in a strange set of unexpected but deliberate decisions, she decided to stay home.

Njaimeh Njie Paula McFetridge 2022 II. Belfast Re-Visited McFetridge is a Belfast woman, through and through. She jokes, “if you cut me down the middle, it would just say Belfast [inside].” More sincerely she reflects, “I think I really realized that what interested me about working in the arts was working in the arts in Belfast.”27 But these were complicated and consequential realizations when she was only in her twenties. It was an intuitive draw to opportunity, not necessarily a fully fleshed understanding or stance, that precipitated an influential set of decisions in 1988. As she finished up what was a fairly disastrous, albeit academically accomplished, two years at Dartington School of the Arts, a series of serendipitous events led the road back home. Upon completing exams in the spring of her second year of study, McFetridge was offered a job with the Scottish 7:84 Theatre Company, founded by John McGrath, Elizabeth MacLennan, and David MacLennan. This politically driven group, focused on wealth disparities and their implications

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[i.e. as the Economist reported in 1966 that 7% of the population owned 84% of the wealth in the UK], offered an interesting opportunity for McFetridge to return to making theater, rather than studying the craft at Dartington. She imagined a temporary, rather than a permanent break upon leaving. Because of the prestigious offer, and her high academic standing, she requested (and she was granted) a year of leave. Following exams, she returned to Belfast for what she thought would be a brief trip to give everyone she missed and loved a “cheerio,” before making her start with 7:84 in Scotland.28 While home she visited with friends and colleagues like Lalor Roddy, Tim Loane, and Stephen Wright. They had recently finished studies at Queen’s University and other ventures and sought to launch Tinderbox Theatre Co. They shared their vision for the company with McFetridge. In a bold move, with the 7:84 offer in her pocket, she made a request before leaving. She walked into the Tinderbox Theatre Co offices with an offer. If they would cast her for three shows, then she would leave the 7:84 offer on the table. She would stay in Belfast for her year of leave. Tinderbox met her where she stood. “I can’t even believe I said that!” she reflects, years later. But the boldness of the moment cast her career in Northern Ireland and Ireland, rather than England and Scotland, for many years to come. It also allowed her to work with Tinderbox Co. from the ground up, which impacted her trajectory as an actress and as a future artistic director as well. Emphases in these years of McFetridge’s career were on the craft of acting, not necessarily artistic directing or directing. She was cast in Catchpenny Twist by Stewart Parker (1990), This Love Thing (1991) by Marina Carr, and The Writings of Thomas Carnduff (1991) for her inaugural years with Tinderbox.29 It was an excellent start to her professional career and a dynamic, uncertain time in Belfast politics and in the arts. Outside the conflict continued, but things were changing. For McFetridge, the return to home was not a matter of giving in to homesickness and frustrations with Dartington. It was more nuanced and deliberate. She was energized with an opportunity to forge a fledgling career in performance and the arts but she wanted control over a start that was more in line with her own aesthetic values. She had a slow confidence growing with an evolving sense of “a natural vocation.”30 At Dartington, the concepts of the practice taught emphasized a theater of cruelty. McFetridge recounts the tutors’ emphasis on a practice that brought an audience into a sense

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of “suffering in order to experience a climactic change, a [palpable] communication between an artist and an audience.” She reflects, That went against everything I’ve ever believed in. They used to have conversations … about how if an audience didn’t get something, the first go-to should not be the quality of the work or the insignificance of what the artist has created … And that was an anathema to me. I just could not get my head around that. I’d placed a real value on circus arts. I’d placed a real value on community arts. I knew the quality of new work we were doing, the potential political impact of theatre, like I’d done the work and knew theatre and been in these projects and knew it could work [before leaving Belfast for Totnes]. Like, before I left, I saw a play called Joyriders written by Christina Reid … I saw the first preview of that show and they brought us all from the Ulster Youth Theatre in to see it. And I remember us sitting, there were four rows of us, and we were all that age [reflecting the characters in the play], we were all between 15 and 18. It blew my mind to hear people talking like me and talking about something [that] had an energy and a vitality, with an absolute understanding of where we were all from. And in Dartington, I felt, these people didn’t believe [that] such a visceral connection was possible. They didn’t put a sizable value on that.31

These artistic differences were perhaps not articulated as such at the time. But the intuitive drive to make a change, to alter her approach as a developing artist, was a fateful and sensitive set of important choices. She recounts, That was at the really early stages of understanding. But I think if I look back on it now, my future choices were inevitable. I also never really [would say], I wouldn’t say I’m particularly ambitious. I wouldn’t say I have ever really had a career path, as such. I understand the precariousness of the profession. I always did. I think I always would have doubted my ability, and I think that comes from an appreciation of the precariousness of the kind of fragility offered [in this career]. But I also knew that Tinderbox was going to do [something] exciting. Because of the guys involved at the time. There was an energy in the type of work that they were doing. And that just spoke to my DNA. Even though we were all from very different backgrounds, and that became more apparent with time. But it just felt like it was the right vehicle. And also, I was just happy being home.32

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Interweaving priorities of vocation, a sense of home and artistic approaches, led back to Belfast. But these were not simply intuitive, or even predictable choices. McFetridge was tapping into a number of significant and complex concepts that would arise in important ways as her career shifted from performing on stage in roles to her own visions as an artistic director and director in the years thereafter. Even if she did not call it ambition at the time, evidence of her drive, her vision, and a deep calling to a specific form of place-based artistic expression had taken hold.

John Baucher (image) convictions script 2000 Held at Linen Hall Library, Belfast

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McFetridge’s gravitation to Belfast in 1990 certainly played on notions of home. As Tim Cresswell writes in regard to work by Yi-Fu Tuan and other theorists, Home is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense of attachment and rootedness. Home, more than anywhere else, is seen as a center of meaning and a field of care. David Seamon has also argued that home is an intimate place of rest where a person can withdraw from the hustle of the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space (Seamon 1979). Home is where you can be yourself. In this sense home acts as a kind of metaphor for place in general.33

The irony of “some degree of control” or a place where “a person can withdraw from the hustle of the world outside” in Belfast in the 1990s isn’t lost on McFetridge. But for her set of choices, McFetridge gravitated to her own core knowledge of calm and control, an intimate understanding of a personal set of experiences in the city. It was home. Its meaning, the “attachment and rootedness” that it offered, suggested that her artistic drive was not particularly different from peers like Duffy (see Chapter 3: Rita Duffy). Just as Christina Reid, a Northern Irish playwright, accesses “an energy and a vitality” in Joyriders , McFetridge was on the cusp of developing a craft that was her interpretation and presentation of an “absolute understanding of where we were all from” as well. She understood the gravitational pull of place and space in her work. And she followed that intuition all the way back home. The decision was the right one. In very little time she was auditioning and landing subsequent roles with Tinderbox Theatre Co. but other companies as well, ranging from the feminist company, Charabanc Co., to the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.34 She had steady work and a strong start to a fulfilling and evolving stage career. In 1991 she returned briefly to Dartington to see the final portfolios and performances of her peers. Her mother joined her on the journey, where McFetridge showed her the telephone box at the train station where she wept when she used to say goodbye at the end of their long-distance phone calls. The trip offered closure, and reminders that she had indeed made the right choice to pursue her craft in Belfast. In Belfast, her vocational momentum continued to build. In 1994, she auditioned and landed a significant role at the Abbey National Theatre in Dublin. This was contemporaneous with the offer

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of a lead role in the Lyric’s production of Anne Devlin’s After Easter. In the Lyric play, actor Vincent Higgins was cast as her love interest. She declined yet another role in Dublin and opted to stay on in Belfast. She also fell in love with Higgins. She unabashedly shares, it was love at first sight.35 They later married in 2003. In keeping with her feminist leanings, she elected not to take his name. “Vincent wouldn’t take mine – why should I take his? And there are only us three girls, so I wanted to keep the name alive in Belfast. All the rest of Daddy’s relatives are in Dublin.”36 But it has proven a rich and fulfilling partnership, at home and in creative practice. She has commissioned work, co-starred, and even directed Higgins in the last two decades. By 1999 McFetridge sought out other aspects of performance arts as well. Increasingly, her aptitude for mathematics and organizational capacities were drawn upon for house administration and leadership positions. From 1997 to 1999 she was the Finance Officer and a Board Member for the Belfast Community Circus. In 1998 and 1999 she was instrumental in organizing the Belfast Carnival. She was a member of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Arts Panel from 1998 to 2001 and she was a Regular Lecturer and Drama Facilitator on the BA (Honors) Theatre Degree at Queen’s University Belfast. She sat on the Northern Ireland Equity Committee from 1997 to 2002 and she received numerous awards and grants ranging from travel grants to undertake research and participate in festivals in New York, U.S.A., Arhus, Denmark, and London, Canada. In 1999 she accepted a position as the Lyric Theatre Education and Outreach Project Co-Ordinator and by 2000 she was an Associate Director at Tinderbox Co. In the fall of 2000, McFetridge seized on a novel opportunity for a production like few before or after in her career. She was the Artistic Director for convictions , a site-specific promenade play at the Crumlin Road Courthouse produced by Tinderbox Theatre Co. This was a monumental production that included seven playwrights and six directors, staging seven discrete plays in different rooms of the defunct and already derelict courthouse. The building had been closed for court hearings for almost three years. It was the site of scorn and mistrust, pain and suffering for many families and individuals throughout the Troubles and even in the decades before. It had housed the controversial and much despised, Diplock System of juryless court proceedings. The future of the building itself was held up in negotiations and various hearings in regard to its ownership and function. But in between disputes, Tinderbox got brief

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access to the grounds and permission to stage a production for a very brief run. The seven plays aptly described as Courthouse Journeys, included: Court No. 2 by Marie Jones; Main Hall by Martin Lynch; Court No. 1 by Owen McCafferty; Jury Room by Nicola McCartney; Male Toilets by Daragh Carville; Judge’s Room by Damian Gorman; and Holding Cell by Gary Mitchell.37 The enormous production involved six directors: Zoe Seaton, Jimmy Fay, James Kerr, Carol Moore, Simon Magill, and Mick Gordon. Invitations to the performances were frank: Crumlin Road Courthouse has been unused for two years, therefore, wear old, warm clothing, waterproof footwear and be prepared to rough it. Please note: this is a promenade performance with audience members walking and standing.38

This experience, this active engagement between artist, space, place, and narrative, would physically engage the audience. They would literally travel through questions pertaining to the embodiment of justice, the miscarriage of justice and everything in between, only two years after the Belfast Agreement. It was a particularly precarious period in the North of Ireland as well. During the conflict, the rules were clear and resolute. To step outside the coded behavior had immediate and often merciless consequences. Oddly, because our conflict was so structured, we understood the rules. So, actually, what became more difficult was [after] the signing of the Good Friday Agreement when all the rules started to change! Now we didn’t understand our society anymore.39

This was particularly poignant in the period of this production as paramilitary feuds rattled out within a mile of the courthouse steps and confounding shifts in powers throughout the city and the region bred a sense of hope and possibility, as well as disarray. The plays captured satirical and poetic considerations of what justice looks like, who is served, and what is lost in the complex and uncertain structures that remained of Northern Ireland’s judicial system and in the long shadows that it cast on a society attempting to build democracy anew in the aftermath of over three decades of outright warfare. In her role as Artistic Director, McFetridge engaged in a steep learning curve and a fully formative experience. She recalls walking through the space

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with colleagues from Tinderbox. They came from various backgrounds. They explored the place and they each wondered aloud, “What can we even agree on in regards to this building?” Each person had their own understanding of what the building might mean. “Whether it stood for justice? Whether it stood for injustice? Whether it represented the state in Ireland? Whether it was a bastion of good citizenship?” They agreed that they wanted it to be a project, first and foremost, “for and about Belfast.” They intended to use the smaller spaces in the building. They identified seven spaces that they wanted to use so that meant seven playwrights and likely seven directors. The plays would be about, “justice, the act of passing judgement, and Belfast here and now. That was all that we could agree on. We were very adamant that the building would be the past, the audience would be the present and that the pieces somehow would create dialogue around a potential future. And we knew that we didn’t want to do living history.”40

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Cover of This is What We Sang script 2009 Kabosh Theatre, Co., Belfast As she reflects on her role in the production and its effect on her practice, McFetridge shares, I could talk about convictions for years. We started an oral archive. I went to meet people. We knew we needed to meet ex-combatants from both sides, people who worked in the courthouse but very quickly I got warned off. Through a friend of a friend, I got called into a meeting and I was advised not to be doing the interviews. It had been determined that I was biased, because of the community that I am from. Even though that wasn’t informing anything. So that made us rethink some stuff.41

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The effort to intimidate was noted and emblematic of a conflict with many unresolved features, despite a Peace Accord. As the Tinderbox team, its playwrights, directors, and cast prepared the production, the poignancy and meaning of the place continued to bewitch and challenge what was possible. They explored the concept of justice in its midst, and it was clear that the courthouse commanded both a recognition and a relinquishing of its legacy. Akin to the suspension of relics in time and political context manifest in Rita Duffy’s Justus Series (see Rita Duffy: Chapter 3) and poetic interruptions to monolith histories like Mairéad McClean’s No More, McFetridge and her team had to at once ground and suspend the performance in this complex and richly narrated place. They needed to move through the space, never staying too long to be captured by the haunting qualities of its features and its lived history, its use. So, the promenade form was both practical and artful. They also needed a circular relationship to time, the past (the building), the present (the audience), and the future. As the circularity shifted in frequent movement, methodically moving from one space to the next, from one performance to the next, the concepts and features of the place oscillated in circles around the audience members, and their relationship to the place, as well the ritual and ceremony, the power struggles endemic to the building’s historical function. McFetridge describes this work as a pivotal experience in her practice. It was demanding work that played on contested narratives and rivaled relationships to home, to place and a myriad of relationships to contentious moral grounds. It was fraught and dicey, it was edgy, and on every level, it was of and about Belfast. This production was a figurative tightrope act but the veteran circus performer channeled every ounce of her intuitive draw to community-based, place focused theater, into the work. It was a poetic and hard-hitting success.42 Reviews and responses to the work were numerous. In The Guardian, Mic Moroney writes, It’s hard for playwrights to seize an audience’s attention in 10 to 15 minutes, but they all make themselves heard, even against the sheer presence of the building, with its unimaginable accumulation of human tragedy. In fact the building itself seems to goad the actors into hypnotic, haunted performances. These Ulster artists are trying to grapple honestly with a deeply uncomfortable past. It’s an unforgettable experience.43

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In a BBC Radio 4, Front Seat interview, playwright Martin Lynch shares his own creative practice as he considered the lived and relatively recent history of the Courthouse. He states, Ghosts are an automatic notion. When you say about having an easy notion or a very strict notion, the notion of the main hallway could have been [about] anything, it was wide open so it was very difficult and I thought I could serve the play best and the people of this city best by looking at what I think this courthouse has been to the city and for me it has been a conveyor belt to put poor people or uneducated people through a justice system that didn’t always do them very good in the end.44

These were plays that capture the complexity of the lived experience and its manifestations in the present day. The production team, the cast, the directors, the audience, and the reviewers alike considered its power and its fragility. In Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Jill Dolan writes I find myself with a keen desire to reclaim a commitment to human commonality. I know that gender, race, sexuality, ability, class and other vectors of identity remain entrenched as discriminatory benchmarks in public discourse and in the distribution of social and political power. But more and more, I find myself feeling affinity without regard to the specifics of identity. As performance scholars Josh Abrams and Janell Reinelt have both remarked, the ethical move in current politics and culture seems toward a responsibility towards each other as each other, both in our radical differences and in our common capacity to embrace the fullness of our potential humanity.45

As the playwrights and directors, under McFetridge’s careful direction, navigated the monolith of history, legacy, and complexity of shared and individual relationships to the already crumbling Crumlin Road Courthouse, convictions gave license to, and embodied, a myriad of narratives and meditations on the power of the place. The various plays, staged in the powerful courts, the powerless toilets, the jury room, the holding cell, the hallway, and so on, shuffle and move the audience through a simulation of complexity and imagined empathetic postures. In each play, the audience inhabits a new imagined iteration of humanity, a new position in relation to the judicial system. As the physical space dictates a new orientation and new relationships to imagined pasts and futures, the

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performance destabilizes fixed notions of place, power, and roles. The audience is gently but forcefully asked to play. They are asked to imagine. They are asked to pause. And they are challenged to momentarily leave those postures and to assume a “responsibility towards each other as each other, both in our radical differences and in our common capacity to embrace the fullness of our potential humanity.” Even if it doesn’t last. Even if it is fleeting, McFetridge and the enormous Tinderbox team challenged their audience to explore and engage a possible future emerging from the crumbled judicial building. In The Crum musical composer Neil Martin recounts his thoughts as he prepared the musical composition and his encounters exploring the building. He writes, I have lived in north Belfast all my life and, like most people living here during the last thirty years, I was curious about the place, about what went on, about what was inside. It was never off the news, that infamous focuspull from barbed wire to scales. I was also wary of it, overwhelmed by its potential. My only visit there was on account of this play … I thought of the wrecked lives of so many children, of the pain that rippled out to so many even within one family circle, of the futility of so many years, of the waste of lives. I thought of lawyers and judges and the threat to them and the result of that on their families. I thought of conscience, of living with guilt, of corruption, both individual and institutional. I thought of the lies told and lived, of helplessness. I thought of my children, my wife, my mother, my family, of words like shame, blame, maim, limb, bomb, bastard, butcher, shoot, kill, torture, torso, shrapnel, evil, cruel, psychotic, cry, pit of stomach, waste. I thought of expedient politicians. I thought of justifying, of explaining, of history, of so much that is now so complicated it cannot be qualified. I imagined I could taste and smell all these things through the walls.46

Like so many, Martin captures the layered and emotional outpour as individuals engaged with the legacies of the Courthouse. And like so many, he carries his own set of narratives, discomforts, and legacies into the place that holds varying and often contradictory values and concerns. As convictions embraced these legacies, acknowledging the prospect of productive tension that might arise from the contradictions, McFetridge, and her team also tapped into its rich possibility to build something anew. To allow something distinct to rise, even momentarily, from its wreckage. Dolan writes,

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Performance can describe, through the fulsome, hopeful, radically humanist gestures of the utopian performative, how social relationships might change. I go to see performances anticipating transformative experiences, ones that will let me see a sliver of a vision, let me feel for a moment in my body and my soul what the world might be like were some form of social justice or progressive social change or some consistent act of real, human love, even partially accomplished. The performatives I’m engaging here aren’t of what is, but transformative doings of what if. This kind of hope represents an opening up, rather than a closing down, of consciousness of the past and the future is in the present …”47

When McFetridge accessed this in convictions , and saw that its critical acclaim was wide, she knew she was on to that “natural vocation.” The acting was still valuable as a form for engaging her calling in the performing arts. But she secured a post as Artistic Director shortly thereafter at the Lyric Theatre. She began that work in January 2001. III. Artistic Director As the Artistic Director at the Lyric, McFetridge staged productions that secured several honors. Conversations on Homecoming in 2002 was awarded the “Best Production at the 2002 BCC Arts Award.” Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was awarded the “Best Actor” and “Best Supporting Actor” at the Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards in 2003. In 2005, Hamlet received the Dublin Theatre Festival Judges Prize for Best Production. In addition to advancements at the Lyric, McFetridge was a Consultant and Curatorial Assistant on the Belfast Linen Hall Library’s State of Play, The Theatre and Cultural Identity in 20 th Century Ulster. She sat on the Board for the Conway Mill Development Trust, she continued as Associate Director of Tinderbox Theatre Co. until 2004 and she was an Arts Council of Northern Ireland Drama Policy Advisor for the projected 2006 to 2011 cycles. In this period she not only stewarded her own career development but shaped significant aspects of the performative arts in Belfast as well. In 2006, McFetridge decided to pursue opportunities that emerged in the brief but powerful production of convictions in 2000. She was offered and accepted the Artistic Director position at Kabosh Theatre Co. The ethos of the company, dedicated to producing site-specific theater spoke to McFetridge’s sophisticated and complex relationship to performative place. This was an opportunity to fully focus on features of individual

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and group relationships to place and space in a city whose history was rife with contestation, rich and confusing conflicts, and commonalities in narratives and reverence for place. It is a role that she has shaped and that has, in turn, shaped her. She works directly with playwrights developing new work, in response to and inspired by specific features of the built and historical environment throughout Belfast. Kabosh’s productions under McFetridge’s watchful eye are numerous. They are dynamic and run the gamut in representations and portrayal of features of the city’s landscape and the communities that access and connect to these elements of place. The prolific output of Kabosh Theatre is staggering. We will touch on just a few productions that capture features of the company’s richness and the important role it plays in playing a pivotal role in exploring how populations access and build meaningful relationships to place in a location saturated with division, contestation, and overlapping histories and narratives. New and adapted works produced by Kabosh Theatre Co. are “informed by the sites, spaces and people of the north of Ireland and the majority of our work examines the legacy of conflict,” McFetridge recounts in The Monthly.48 The sites and spaces cover a considerable range of places from a black taxi in Laurence McKeown’s Two Roads West to the Belfast Synagogue and The Synagogue for the Arts in Tribeca, NY for Gavin Kostick’s This is What We Sang . Both staged in 2009, these plays offered inroads to seemingly static legacies in key parts of the city. The prospect of movement and music, respectively, pushes seemingly intractable narratives into new spaces as audiences are asked to engage with lesser-known narratives that reinscribe meaning on storied enclaves of the city. In Two Roads West , intimate performances can take a maximum of five passengers at a time. Black Taxis, informal modes of transportation in Nationalist and Unionist working-class districts, where bus lines were often canceled or limited in runs due to unrest or military movement, necessitated informal, and respective, taxi services provided by local members of the highly segregated communities. In the Black Taxi performances, the vehicle literally traverses between historically contentious neighborhoods in West Belfast as a narrative unfolds. It is a story of tolerance and curiosity of the other, as a native Belfast woman returns after years of separation due to emigration. The story is not complex, but the shifting landscape as the performance is delivered betrays the artistic license afforded in McFetridge’s move to Kabosh. She can move

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performances from site to site, from static to moving stages that challenge her audience to imagine alternative relationships and stories through playful shifts in position, posture, and sensory stimulation. In Place: An Introduction, Cresswell writes, The brutal fact of places such as these [i.e. sites of conflict or atrocity] forces a debate about what they mean and what to do with them. People with differing interests have to make their care for preservation and what is to be included or excluded and thus a new kind of place is born out a contested process of interpretation. The connection between place and memory and the contested nature of this connection has been the object of considerable enquiry by geographers recently and promises to be a major component of geographical research in the future.49

The moving taxi unpacks the constraints of the differing interests and “what they mean and what to do with them.” The issue does not go away, it does not undermine the significance of the contestation and contradictions but something of the movement suspends the notion of a fixed “connection.” The two roads, heading west, allow for a set of connections to offer a plurality of meaning in links between place and memory. The political contest will continue to infiltrate and call for a rank or a competition in regard to leveraging these meanings. But in the fluid moment of performance, the vehicle’s speed and its prospect of continued motion in its function as a taxi, disrupt the history and the context that has previously constrained interpretations of places like West Belfast. The play suggests a variety of ways into play with meaning and connections, which individuals and groups can articulate or try on in the relative safety of the performance. In This is What We Sang , the play itself is the site of remembrance. An enormous project that involved hours of interviews (curated by Jo Egan) for an oral archive to preserve legacies and vernacular histories of Belfast’s aging and rather small Jewish population, served as the inspiration for Kostick’s play. A Dublin native, commissioned to write the play based on the compiled oral archive, Kostick fashions a series of musical performances and first-person narration to document the reckoning with legacies and personal atonement that is foundational to the work. The play attends to Repentance. Sacrifice. Forgiveness. As Lev explores his own responsibilities in a family that has both struggled and succeeded in multigenerational relationships to the city, the play’s layered quality of evolving

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relationships, intimate revelations, and oscillation between song and the strong role of women in the community of characters, offers levity and interruptions to dominant narratives of sectarian division in the city that so often fall on blunt Catholic/Protestant lines. McFetridge’s guidance of the production, directing the play’s formation in the context of the revered and carefully cared for synagogue, as the physical instantiation of a historical and significant interruption to dominant narratives of Catholic/Protestant binaries is both enriching and politically salient in a period of optimism and tremendous legislative development on a possible functional and influential Northern Irish Assembly. Her careful work with Kostick, over countless revisions as the playwright’s work evolves from the oral archive repository to narrative threads and staged performance, breathe new life into the Belfast Synagogue with a love letter to the congregations, past and present, that bear witness to the city’s fitful evolution.

This is What We Sang 2009 Cast & Crew Kabosh Theatre Co., Belfast

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Njaimeh Njie Paula McFetridge 2022 The dual performance of This is What We Sang , staged in Belfast and New York’s Synagogue of the Arts raised the profile of the performance as well. The bridging of narratives across diasporic populations i.e. the Eastern European Jewish diaspora to other parts of Europe and the United Kingdom, echoing emigration waves from Northern Ireland and Ireland in a series of local political, economic and ecological crises, coaxes a gentle reckoning on shared vulnerability and the dignity afforded to graceful recognition of this shared vulnerability in times of duress and times of calm. As McFetridge performs the narrative of a rapidly aging and depleting Jewish population that has helped to shape features of the city, the “tables” and furnishings depicted as artifacts, in Catholic and Protestant homes alike in the play, help the production to destabilize fast and hard features of division. From the personal furnishings in a home, to the sound of prayer at churches or synagogues, the production suggests an entertainment of the common features of family, song, and the process of atonement that we each seek with the divine or simply with one another.

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IV. Imagined Alternatives In the wake of David Cameron’s referendum in 2016, calling for a vote on the UK’s possible exit from the EU, life in Belfast has not been the same. Politics and governance have not been stable as one assembly lurched to the next, stopping and starting seated sessions in Stormont. The making of original theater in the city has called for dynamism to continually engage with this volatility, as the region still continues to come to terms with its relatively recent past. As time and politics continue to move and evolve, theatrical play attends to these permutations in interesting and novel ways as well. In the fall of 2016, Kabosh debuted Laurence McKeown’s Green and Blue. A commissioned play that Kabosh produced in partnership with Diversity Challenges, the work is based on a deep oral archive collected from former Royal Ulster Constabulary and Garda Síochána who served along the Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland border. Analogous to the delicacy of Duffy’s Outposts series that led to the artist requesting permission from the recently demilitarized leadership of the IRA and the British Military to visit the outposts along the border, former IRA volunteer and hunger striker, Laurence McKeown, was an unlikely playwright for the project. Yet, amidst a robust pool of artistic applicants, he was chosen. McFetridge ushered the play through multiple iterations, meeting with McKeown and former officers, their families, and negotiating McKeown’s artistic independence in the commissioned work. What resulted is a moving and simple script and production that interrogates the states represented in the respective Blue (Garda) and Green (RUC) uniforms, and the perceived and manifest values and contested national wills to power embodied in each. The state conflicts are personalized, however, by the common features of humanity that each character finds in the other. This is accomplished in simple, seemingly innocuous banter that reveals features of how the perceived other can turn and see meaningful commonality in the other.

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Borders play a significant role in this play that interestingly involves very simple lighting, a relatively basic set, and a cast of two. The play is not site-specific, it is mobile. It lends itself to performances in any number of venues from leisure centers to chapel gathering spaces to school auditoriums. It is a play about the border, about seemingly static identity, the uniformity of systemic, state policing forces that can readily move and tour throughout the country and abroad. The performance possibilities embody the subjective movement and hope for a meeting of minds that are fundamental to the emotive shift in the content of the play. As McKeown and McFetridge masterfully craft the play to engage some of the most poignant concerns in Northern Ireland, in a contemporary moment where the reformulated Police Service of Northern Ireland seeks to build trust with a deeply distrustful society, the play offers everyone a glimpse of themselves. It is a play about commonalities in the guise of difference. It is a prospective transformation afforded through performance, where the border is at once pervasive and traversed, as the two men exchange stories, share intimate concerns, and eventually meld into individuals that stand in contrast to the uniforms that signify neighboring lives that are worlds apart.

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Connor McClure Graphic Design 2017 Quartered Belfast, A Love Story Kabosh Theatre Co., Belfast In 2017, McFetridge commissioned Dominic Montague to write Quartered—Belfast, A Love Story. In this production, Kabosh’s site-specific production builds its ambition to a stage that includes the Cathedral Quarter of the city. Building out of efforts like The West Awakes, a walking

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tour that includes five narratives about the city, this promenade play attends to what is and what was throughout the city for a gay man. As the protagonist interrogates the should I stay or should I go permutations of an emigration decision, the play teases out the specific coloration of such concerns for a man who cannot express his full life, ambition, and partnership in the claustrophobic features of a city that still negotiates gender and sexual orientation along conservative binaries of old, regardless of sect. Like Duffy, Montague mines the interspace to see what is, what can be and what features of the received expectations for gender expression he will explore, try on, and cast anew as he navigates his own evolving relationship to a city that he might just leave. The play situates these concerns in the evolving commercial sector of the Cathedral Quarter, a neighborhood that is adjacent but not directly proximate to West Belfast’s Falls Road and the Shankill Road. It is also the site of the recently renovated and greatly expanded Ulster University Belfast campus. The businesses shift and change as the city center evolves and builds new attractions for locals, and tourists alike, to visit. After decades of detractions from entering the city center, business ventures continually evolve to attract Belfast residents to eat, play and enjoy its newest features. The underground meeting places, gay clubs, and bars, continually evolve and shift too as the liminal space continually moves by necessity to stay ahead of threats and constrictions. In Quartered a promenade of the city in the play’s production is a testament to the simultaneous then and now of the shifting underground gay scene in Belfast too. Montague writes, Being gay in Belfast, you have to have a double identity, you have different selves for different spaces. A different walk for different streets, a different laugh, a different way of being with people, a different way of being yourself. If there’s one city that’s accustomed to dual identities, it’s Belfast. It’s second nature to be aware of how what you are can become who you are. Identities are something to be managed, concealed, changed depending on your geography. Something that supersedes the sum of your parts; your first name, your second name, your postcode, your primary school, your sexuality. Things which are yours but not the definition of you, they become the entirety of you.50

In the intimate production that involves small groups of up to six individuals, guided on a walking tour of the Cathedral District with headphones

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that cast the monologue from I-pods, the Quartered production is carefully orchestrated and syncopated. The guide silently offers hand signals to indicate movement from one location to the next, movement through the city that is deeply intimate. The monologue lodges in your mind, with the ambient sounds of the city as a backdrop to the production, as you literally walk in the shoes of the play’s protagonist. Like convictions , movement plays a critical role in the play. The powerful role of movement and the pause of staying still, poetically sweep the monologue into complex and liminal spaces where identity meets feeling, where place connotes a sense of home. In closing passages of the play, Montague writes, Deciding to stay, it’s not just for him. It’s for me. This is home. Every night I go to sleep in this city I make that choice again. To stay. For as long as I’m here I have power to make things better. Not just for me. For us. We all have that power. The distance from a gay venue where that feeling of belonging extends to isn’t measured by metres, it’s determined by sightlines. We can take that sense of belonging, and centre it in ourselves. Not in any physical space, not in any allotted time, but with us. We can look out for each other. See each other. Speak up for each other. Each of us has the power to strike a note that changes the world. Notes are strong, chords are stronger. We don’t just have to hope for the future. We can want. Everything. Now.51

In the strong call and response that closes the play, the protagonist calls on the audience to listen. They are not to just hear the monologue but to listen, to stand still, to consider the sightlines from the protagonist’s perspective after forty-five minutes of walking in his shoes. The cadence of the play is significant. The culmination of its rhythm calls on the viewer to engage and immerse in the city as a player as well. The audience is both held accountable and emboldened, empowered to “want” and to imagine taking action. This is not a play to consume like features of the commercial district of the city, Quartered charges the audience with shared responsibility in making the city anew. “This is home.” This is where the imagined we choose to stay, taking up the “power to make things better.” The features of optimism and empowerment embedded in the Kabosh Quartered performance are part and parcel of McFetridge’s continually

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evolving relationship with the city as well. She and Vincent Higgins bought a house on the edges of East Belfast more than fifteen years ago. “The idea of moving from West Belfast to East Belfast is just bizarre!” she jokes when she describes the home. But the “wee Victorian terraced house” is in a neighborhood where “all the older people who have lived there for years and years, a lot of old shipyard workers” are joined by newer arrivals, from other quarters of the city or further afield, many of them artists. She can walk twenty-five minutes to Kabosh offices along the river Lagan. There is no garden but since she “hates moving … so I’ve only lived in three houses in my life,” the prospect of graduating to gardening is not much of a possibility. But she is held busy by Kabosh. It is a thriving company, cross funded through the Northern Ireland Arts Council, the Belfast City Council, and a range of other foundations and grants, as well as box office sales. Her keen eye for building infrastructure and mathematical acumen serve her still as she finds innovative productions and interesting ways to evolve the company and to engage the city, her home, in Belfast. In the closing discussions of Peter Murphy’s The Paradox of Dialogue he writes, Art and pedagogy share in these powers. But a note of scepticism is also in order. Artists and intellectuals are very tempted to proselytize either on behalf of the enlightenment state or pre-enlightenment cultures. They readily become enlisted in the cause of universal legal rights or militant particularistic hierarchies. In doing so, they set aside art’s essential powers of dramaturgy, metaphor and polyphony … In either case, they lose their sense of humour and irony – and their distance from society. They become engaged with a ‘point of view.’ They parrot all kinds of earnest strictures. They come out fighting, some of them on behalf of tradition’s claustrophobic moralities and others in aid of the enlightenment state’s mildly despotic regulations. What this results in is a palpable loss because neither enlightened state regulation nor muliticultural romance can do what the anonymous power of the city can. This is to make it possible for some very unlikely forces to cohabit. This does not happen without tension. Nonetheless, the cohabitation of opposites is possible because the civilization of the city adapts well to antinomy. It does this principally through physical, material and dramaturgical – in a word, through non-discursive – forms. These adapt well to the city’s oscillating motions and its perpetual need to blend innumerable forces. Great cities are what they are because they are able to effectively meld the universal and the particular, the recurrent and the accident. In the city, the new and the old, the finished and

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the incomplete, the permanent and the temporary, the supernatural and the natural coexist in the conflicting, interwoven, dramaturgical and yet very practical harmony. The public theatre of the great city of strangers is able to mediate this is a way that neither law, nor reason, nor language can.52

In the gravitational pull towards home, McFetridge taps into the possibility of the city. Its dramaturgical power and it “public theater.” Her “natural vocation” emanates Belfast. It is both home and a perpetual calling.

Njaimeh Njie Paula McFetridge 2022

Notes 1. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 2. “Paula McFetridge: I Had a Really Bad Stutter, But I Beat it for Acting,” Belfast Telegraph, 2016. 3. Ibid. 4. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 5. Ibid.

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6. “Paula McFetridge: I Had a Really Bad Stutter, But I Beat it for Acting,” Belfast Telegraph, 2016. 7. Ibid. 8. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 9. “Paula McFetridge: I Had a Really Bad Stutter, But I Beat it for Acting,” Belfast Telegraph, 2016. 10. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. https://www.tinderbox.org.uk/news-productions/?_sft_productionyear=1991 and https://www.tinderbox.org.uk/news-productions/?_sft_ production-year=1990. 30. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction 2nd Edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 39. 34. Charabanc Theatre Company was founded in 1983 by Eleanor Methven, Marie Jones, Carol Scanlan (Moore), Brenda Winter and Maureen McAuley. See also: Claudia Harris (Ed.), Four Plays by Charabanc Theatre Companny: Reinventing Woman’s Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2007. 35. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022 and “Paula McFetridge: I Had a Really Bad Stutter, But I Beat it for Acting,” Belfast Telegraph, 2016. 36. “Paula McFetridge: I Had a Really Bad Stutter, But I Beat it for Acting,” Belfast Telegraph, 2016.

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37. convictions script held at the script archives, Linen Hall Library, Belfast. 38. Invitation letter to convictions held in archives at Linen Hall Library, Belfast. 39. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 40. Interviews with Paula McFetridge 2020–2022. 41. Ibid. 42. Acclaim included reviews in The Guardian, BBC Radio 4 Front Seat, Irish Times, etc. 43. Mic Moroney, “Court in the Act,” The Guardian, October 31, 2000. 44. Transcript BBC Radio 4 Front Seat, November 7, 2000. Presenter: Mark Lawson; Interviewee: Martin Lynch. Held at archive Linen Hall Library, Belfast. 45. Jill Dolan Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 140. 46. Neil Martin, The Crum in Convictions script, archive Belfast Linen Hall Library, Belfast. 47. Jill Dolan Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 141. 48. The Monthly Community Arts Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: https://www.capartscentre.com/2020/11/the-monthly-interviewspaula-mcfetridge-from-kabosh-theatre-company-about-responding-to-thepandemic-part-1/. 49. Tim Cresswell, Place: An Introduction 2nd Edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 125. 50. Dominic Montague, Quartered Belfast, A Love Story (Belfast: unpublished, Kabosh Theatre Co.), 2017. 51. Ibid. 52. Peter Murphy, “The Paradox of Dialogue,” Policy Futures in Education, Volume 9, No. 1, 2011, 26–27.

CHAPTER 5

Ursula Burke

Arthur Horgan Ursula Burke 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_5

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An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all of the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. Long residence enables us to know a place intimately, yet its image may lack sharpness unless we can also see it from the outside and reflect upon our experience. Another place may lack the weight of reality because we know it only from the outside … It is a characteristic of the symbol-making human species that its member can become passionately attached to places of enormous size, such as a nation-state, of which they can have only limited direct experience. Yi-Fu Tuan

Ursula Burke was born on December 27, 1974, to Johanna (Josie) and Christopher (Christie) Burke. One of five children, Burke was the second youngest child. A self-proclaimed quiet girl, she was an “anxious little bird,” who silently observed her large family.1 She grew up in cramped quarters in a terraced council house in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. She shared a bedroom with elder sisters Linda, born in 1967, and Anne, born in 1972, and later, Christine, born in 1977. Stephen, her only brother who was born in 1969, had his own bedroom. Burke was a clever student, gravitating to art in primary and secondary school where she excelled; first at the Sisters of Charity Primary School and later at the Loretto Convent Secondary School. She was introduced to art formally by Sister Rosemary, and she sat for the subject in both the Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate exams. In her early education, instruction was limited and high-quality materials were in short supply. Pencils, poster paints, colored pencils, and “rubbish brushes,” were Burke’s first tools as she explored painting and drawing. The brushes caused such frustration that Burke broke rules on exams and small assignments alike. To achieve the detail and rendering she sought, she would paint and then layer painted work with delicate and intricate colored pencil. “Feck this” was the mantra when she struggled with the “crap” materials in these early years. She took the form into her own hands though and she made do with what she had. She even ignored the prospect of disqualifying paintings on her exams by using a colored pencil overlay. These work-arounds, however, laid unexpected foundations for her work. Burke learned the benefit of moving between media to achieve focused expression. Today, her masterful hand weaves messages with medium as she strives for balance and precision. But she is not beholden to a single form. Instead, Burke exploits each material for all that it

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can offer and if she reaches a limit, she engages another. This yields a layering quality to her work that captures the complexity and nuance of her response to the world that surrounds her. Coming of age in Clonmel was sweet, quaint, and oppressive. When Burke was about three or four years old, her mother Josie suffered a nervous breakdown. With five children and little money, Burke saw her mother carry on as a “silent warrior.” Following the breakdown, and a regular dosage of “hardcore drugs,” Josie was temporarily brought to a catatonic state. When she wasn’t making the dinner or tending to children, Burke remembers her mother sitting on the sofa, “fag in her mouth, just rocking, rocking.”2 But she didn’t stay there. As Josie recovered with support from her husband and family, Burke quietly came of age. Clonmel was somewhere to grow up. It was picturesque and charming in its bucolic state. But it was also a place to leave. Art School, whatever that might be or where, was going to be her way out. Growing up in Clonmel in the 1980s, women, in particular, stared down the stronghold of the Church and fishbowl voyeurism, where everyone seemed to know, or wanted to know, your business. Burke could not wait to escape. This was not a place to show a difference. Few openly shared that they were gay. Even to have red hair, like Burke and as Burke describes, her conventionally beautiful sister Anne, was to draw attention. To wear a hat would solicit comment.3 As she grew up, seeking as little attention as possible, Burke stewed in difference. “My super-power was my ability to draw,” she recalls. Despite an effort to slip under the radar with an almost silent countenance at home and at school, Burke stood out. As her art teacher, Sister Rosemary, confided to her mother, “Ursula is a credit [to you].” While art was not necessarily a calling in this early period, Burke knew that it might be a ticket out. So “Art and College was what I was going to do,” she recalled.4 But a conventional path to university was not quite available. Although Burke sat for Art in her Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate exams, she had no portfolio. To gain admission to any Art College in Ireland this was a necessity. She had excellent points in the Leaving Certificate but a year of preparation was needed to prepare ample materials for admissions review. She also needed a personal bridge to make the physical move to college seem possible. Since finances were tight and neither of her parents had left home to pursue an education, Burke needed a bridge, figuratively and literally. That came in the form of a PostLeaving Certificate course in portfolio preparation, which was sponsored

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by the local council. She also found a personal link to Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, the institution where she sought admission to Art College, through a school friend, Sinéad. When Sinéad left Clonmel to pursue engineering at G-MIT in the fall term after the Leaving Certificate, she was both a contact and a role model for what might be possible for Burke in the following year. In the interim, Burke undertook a serious focus on her portfolio. She worked with a couple who team-taught in the council-sponsored continued learning program in Clonmel. In this program, she expanded on the rudimentary art education offered by the nuns at Loretto Convent Secondary School.5 She built a skill set in drawing and painting. And a new medium in lens work with photography. This proved a very important venture in her early practice. She learned the mechanics of a camera, worked with film and learned development techniques. The opening to leave Clonmel began with a positive review of her newly formed portfolio, then an admissions offer and matriculation at G-MIT in autumn 1993. II. Taking Flight In Galway, Burke flourished. Living with her school-years friend, Sinéad [the engineer in the making], and 6 other women in a four-bedroom house, Burke was in her element. She was very poor but she loved the newfound freedom. Although she had repeated dinners of beans on toast, she also had recurring dreams of flying. “For the first time in my life, I found where I needed to be. I would dream of flying at night; [which] I interpreted as a moment of freedom,” she recounts. “For the first time, I found it. This is me. I was always a different thinker and I realized it wasn’t that different. I found others like me [in Galway].”6 In the first year of the program, Burke was immersed in courses that focused on technique: painting, sculpture, photography, and film. After completion of the first year, students were expected to choose a discipline. The pressure was on to choose between painting and sculpture. But it seemed an impossible choice. Even in her current practice, Burke moves between disciplines. Fervent in her evolving education, she refused to choose a specific medium. Burke negotiated for a third semester in experimental painting and sculpture before finally deciding to pursue sculpture. Galway offered a traditional approach to technique and method in studio art. “It was so important and it still stands to me today,” Burke reflects as she considers the influence of this period. At the time, “there

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[was] a real urge to [pursue] conceptual approaches to teaching but I believe there is an important bedrock in skills. They [faculty at Galway] taught us to cast, to arc weld, to prime canvas. I learned this all more than twenty years ago. I didn’t use it until years later. I was taught how to make a two-part mold of a lipstick.” It is a skill, unbeknownst to Burke at the time, that would indeed become the foundation of her sculpture practice with porcelain over a decade later. But in that moment, Burke was in a sweet shop of practice and opportunity, worlds away from Clonmel. Faculty like Lochlann Hoare relished Burke’s talent in drawing. Hoare, who she remembers as resembling an owl, was a “character” who pushed her, identifying Burke’s talent and tireless work ethic. He insisted on taking students to life drawing classes, claiming these skills were the basis of sculpture. “If you understand the mechanics of the body,” Ursula recalls Hoare teaching, “then you can make anything with sculpture.” Gerard Leslie, another tutor, taught Ursula how to cast and to make land art. “They used to take us away,” Burke recalls. “They’d say ‘pack a bag, we’re going to the beach for a day and a night.’ And then we’d head to Connemara and go away and make a piece of art in response to the land and we’d talk about it or whatever.”7 The freedom to just go, to allow the ventures, the practice, and the studio to dictate the day-to-day was both a release and a structure in which Burke would thrive. “Galway … gave me so much,” Burke recalls. It would stand her in good stead before another big move, this time from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland. In 1997, at 23 years old, she moved to Belfast.

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Ursula Burke The Three Gracies 2013 Porcelain, underglaze, transparent gloss, and gold lustre Dimensions: 22 cm x 11 cm The MAC, Belfast

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A move from Galway to Belfast in 1997 for a young, Catholic woman, was no small feat. The 1994 IRA ceasefire held, more or less, but the prospect of a sustained peace in these years, still seemed like a dream. The prospect of graduating with a bachelor of Arts from Ulster University, however, called Burke. This was a chance to study and graduate from a highly regarded program and an opportunity to engage with new conceptual, aesthetic, and political territory. It would serve as a crucial advance beyond the foundation that she gained in Galway. When she first arrived in Belfast, she moved into a tiny flat with a boyfriend from Wexford who she knew from Galway. They rented in the Lawrence Road area of the Holylands, amidst a neighborhood that was mixed (Catholic and Protestant) and full of migrants. But it was known then (and perhaps now) as a no-man’s-land. The accommodations were cheap but poor in comfort. Their flat had an outdoor toilet that was down a flight of stairs. But in comparison to “the South that was so safe, so certain, Belfast was electric. We had no clue about the cultural shorthand that you learn after a while. But the art college was such a vibrant hub of folk from the south, the north and a few international students that we soon figured stuff out.” Burke recalls “when I first got to Belfast we were really nervous and green. But I think our families [Burke’s in Clonmel and her boyfriend’s in Wexford] were more worried about the political situation than we were. It felt exciting living in a place on the edge all the time and I think it was a kind of political and cultural awakening for [both of] us.”8 While the initial move was to complete a degree, Belfast would become the backdrop and the focus for her next decade of practice. This was a period of tremendous growth, as an emerging artist and as a young mother. From 1997 to 1999, Burke undertook completion of an undergraduate degree. On April 24, 1999, she gave birth to her daughter, Daisey. From 2000 to 2002, Burke pursued a master’s of Fine Art at the Ulster University, Belfast. Contemporaneous to formal study, with a toddler in the house, Burke was co-director of Belfast’s Catalyst Arts Gallery. In her practice, this was the period of the lens. In 2001 she would show her work for the first time, I Am My Mother’s Daughter, at an exhibition space in Tipperary. It was also published in SOURCE, Issue 27 Summer 2001. While certainly distinct from later practice in sculpture, drawing, embroidery and weaving, the thematic thread of exploring and interrogating roles for women in Ireland, privately and publicly, as daughters, as mothers and as physical embodiments that are both valorized and shamed, was central to the work.

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In a series of photographs that feature her mother, Josie, and her daughter, Daisey, Burke examines female embodiment. In this collection she juxtaposes historical roles in the private sphere with public expectations. Burke connotes binds of femininity as Josie is costumed in a brocade, ornate dress, complete with a structured and confining bodice. Examining her aging face in a mirror, Josie inhabits contradictions of the historic and contemporary, the folds of the dress brushing the ground of an encroaching, simple, and modern bathroom. Gazing into a vanity mirror, whiskers just visible without concealment of heavy make-up or invasive hair removal, Burke’s portrait of Josie haunts the conventions, and lack-there-of, for a myriad of women in Ireland. Her mother’s eyes are vacant, the toilette incomplete, yet she stands as the matron of the family unit nonetheless. In other shots, Daisey sleeps in a crowded bedroom and Burke herself, inhabits the same gown as her mother, insisting on the overlaps and contrasts in a maternal line from mother, to daughter, to granddaughter. At times harrowing, yet often tender, the collection was a conceptual and technical achievement. It was a first, an early collection rendering authenticity, beauty, and commentary as its central markers. This exhibition and publication anticipate the complexity and dynamism of Burke’s later practice as well.9

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Ursula Burke I Am My Mother’s Daughter 2001 SOURCE Amidst a loving and supportive family, Daisey was cared for by Burke’s father, Christie, for the exhibition’s opening. He teased Burke that she’d “shame the family,” as he considered how the intimate portraits might be perceived and interpreted in a public exhibition. But he and Josie were also “so, so proud.”10 They beamed as they saw their daughter’s achievement manifest in something tangible, something public, and something completely her own. The role of family support structures for minding Daisey, embracing Burke’s ambitions, and seeing her through to the next phases of an emerging career persisted in later periods of her life. But

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the foundation for these structures was set in this first exhibition, where her fearless mode of expression was made public for the first time. These were not oblique references to the ways that women navigate Irish culture or gendered roles. Burke’s work considered these forces directly, with a piercing style and critique. I Am My Mother’s Daughter served as a distillation of Burke’s learning in the foundational phase of her development. It could be understood, perhaps, as a crowning achievement that synthesized her growth ranging from secondary school, the portfolio building year, Galway and the finishing touches in her initial work at the University of Ulster, where she completed a master of Fine Art in 2002. Although Galway was “hugely formative” in its material approach and emphasis on technique, Ulster University “was conceptual in its approach.” Burke recalls, “It was useful for me [too]. I needed more input in regard to building out ideas, to fully flesh out ideas. And I really had a lack of confidence in that area. My Ph.D. was the first point in my life when I thoroughly threw myself into reading in a really rigorous way and fed my brain. I cross-referenced ideas and that was when the maturity came to the work. Having the skill-base then really blossomed because having the ideas and the skills-base tended to join up at that point. How are your ideas so fleshed out? The only answer to that is by doing; by seeing; by reading; by feeding. It’s the only way the magic will happen.”11 This earnest engagement with the concept began formally in 2006 with matriculation in the Ulster University practice-based Ph.D. program. Burke would earn a doctorate in practice in 2011. But the synthesis of technique and concept was not only achieved through formal study. Burke continued to live in Belfast from 1997 through 2020. She arrived in Belfast before the historically significant Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 and witnessed the complexities and uncertainty of the region’s emergence from conflict. She saw the evolution of a fragile and cold peace, the development and suspension of power-sharing governments. She resided in Belfast during the circus of Brexit, David Cameron’s referendum to determine if the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union. She also saw the several years of fallout that ensued from Cameron’s fateful gamble and the unexpected role that the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party would play in Teresa May’s coalition government. The political and cultural context of living as an Irish woman in a society in flux, as much as formal study, was evident in Burke’s work from

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the early 2000s onward. Through this period her practice suggests that living in the North was as much of an education as her academic training at Ulster. III. Slip Cast When Daisey was about four years old, Burke and her then partner, Daniel Jewesbury, moved to an idyllic home in Dromore, Co. Down. In this predominantly Protestant area, Burke was squarely a member of the minority population in a region that continued to solidify its sectarian divisions as the peace process unfolded. Jewesbury and Burke purchased the house from artist Phillip Napier, an indication of just how close the art world can be. “It was a beautiful house with a very big garden,” she recalls. “It was perfect for a family with a young kid. I overlooked the overwhelmingly Protestant area that it was because of what it gave Daisey.” Ignoring sectarian division in a seemingly idyllic domestic sphere that Jewesbury and Burke built to bring up Daisey, the concerns of the cultural and political context did not lie quietly in other aspects of Burke’s psyche and practice. In this crucial period of metamorphosis she recounts, “I knew I could reach for ideas. But probably they were in their infancy and I could not have had the richness [of] now, that kind of multi-layered approach that I have of different periods or concepts; where I have various periods vibrating at the same time.”12 Instead, features of the concerns that become layered and synthesized in more recent work peeked out, piece by piece. An example of this slow emergence is evident in the 2005 Archive: Lisburn Road exhibition at Belfast Exposed, assembled in collaboration with Jewesbury. In this work Burke explores a counternarrative to the public story associated with Belfast in photojournalism and art photography—“war-torn, industrial (more recently, post-industrial), divided by inexplicable hatreds.” Instead, Archive: Lisburn Road documents and studies one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Northern Ireland, a community that does not necessarily see or present itself as such, “a Belfast that minded its own business for thirty years.” It is a loosely affiliated community whose members share an income bracket and a sensibility. They visit wine bars, high-end boutiques and take leisurely spins in the various sports cars that line streets adjacent to “neatly trimmed hedges [that] form the ‘soft boundaries’ between private and public spaces.”13 In this exhibition Burke and Jewesbury mine the confounding co-existence

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of Belfast’s various populations and the implications of only a particular narrative hitting the domestic and international headlines. Burke and Jewesbury interrupt legacies of violence and division that plague the working-class neighborhoods by reminding the viewer of the affluent settler class, those who might indirectly or directly benefit from the strife of their brethren in the lower classes. Their subject is the population that needn’t worry about the day’s stalling peace processes, tit-for-tat gang violence that is the ugly inheritance of communities plagued by vestiges of paramilitary activity, or mobilization of political representation to participate in the fledgling and highly orchestrated checks-and-balance power-sharing government. These are the individuals who can window shop and stop for a coffee at a “pavement café” as they walk quiet, treelined streets. They can choose to stay in the neighborhood rather than venture into the city center or the estates that are plagued by disillusioned former combatants, unsure of future prospects in work or education. They can ignore the plight of immigrants or LGBTQ + members of the Belfast community whose intersectionality pushes against a deeply conservative society compelled to see individuals in imprecise, rigid, and aged binaries: Protestant/Catholic; Republican/Unionist; female/male; working class/ middle class; rural/urban; and so on. While Archive: Lisburn Road ventures towards the dynamism, and a potential to play across media, time, history, and politics that Burke was edging towards in her evolving practice, the work could not archive the notion of movement that she sought in its photographic form. “A lot of that [a will towards movement and complexity that was not quite achieved] was tied up still [in] making photography. I went into the Ph.D. making the photography and I had such a degree of dissatisfaction with the medium,” Burke recounts. “It was clinical … argy-bargy decisions about getting it printed. I started to go back to just making, using my hands and instantly that felt better. And that niggling thing, the love, the obsession with the classical world. Every time I saw marble I just lit up. In the Ph.D. that was the turning point in my practice. In the Ph.D. I wanted to make a piece of marble but I couldn’t carve marble. I thought I’d make a piece of porcelain but I didn’t know shit about porcelain or casting.” Aside from the brief lipstick mold lesson at Galway, Burke had not returned to ceramics in years. The Head of Ceramics at Ulster offered Burke a 40-minute lesson. He asked, “Do you know how to make

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a mold?” as they met in the basement of the College for a refresher on how to slip cast. After this short but fateful session, Burke would pivot into the next decade of transformative work.

Ursula Burke Born 2013 Parian porcelain and stain Dimensions: 27 cm × 16 X 10 cm The MAC, Belfast The deep but oblique explorations of Northern Ireland’s contradictions, its maddening binaries and a continual stalling out of meaningful growth of democratic processes in the midst of very real and complex legacies of the conflict, were presented in the quiet, anthropological study of Archive: Lisburn Road. But when the surreal, elements of mythological heroes and monsters, met the street politics of Belfast in Burke’s sculptural practice, her career and practice took off. The foundation of “feeding the brain” in doctoral studies allowed Burke to pursue questions pertaining to authenticity in practice. This brought levels of thinking and engagement with a conceptual underpinning that allowed the practice of making to catch up to newfound depths in regard to sophisticated critical thinking. It yielded penetrating and provocative theoretical explorations across media, form,

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and scale. Identity expression and transformation, sectarian division, legacies and inheritance of culture and hate, negotiations of power and their abuses each trickled into delicate, carefully composed, and meticulously cast porcelain sculptures. Embroidery, typically understood as a feminine craft, was explored as a venue for political critique as well. Much of Burke’s work following doctoral studies was highly complex in its form, concept, and critique: explorations of hyper-masculinity and its sinister threats of violence were explored and cast in intricate, delicate porcelain sculptures; mythological monsters accompanied familiar flags at the height of regional and national disputes. Familiar and increasingly exhausted tropes were drained of their usual features and cast anew, repositioning questions pertaining to nationalism and its justification of violent acts. Public relics of division like painted kerbstones and gable-end homes adorned with paramilitary murals were softened with imagined alternatives that cast floral patterns reminiscent of domestic textiles on neat renderings of Belfast rowhouses and semi-detached homes. Such pieces alluded to an imagined release from the confines and oppression still associated with working-class enclaves and estates. The peace process did not deliver the range of social and cultural change that some had hoped for since 1998. Burke’s work documents these concerns, explores imagined alternatives, and evokes the absurd, the concerning and the empowering aspects of a society striving to find a new identity after the betrayals and crises of tradition and its cousin, nationalism. As an exercise in the richness of interrogating contrast, Burke’s practice embodied tensions that explored the insider–outsider dichotomy of provincialism, the participantobserver of a society emerging from violent conflict and relationships to identity that melded political realities with mythology. In Burke’s 2013 exhibition at the MAC Belfast, Hope for a Better Past, we are introduced to a new stage in practice and frames of reference. This exhibition suggested a range of aesthetic and political explorations and interrogations that would become a fully developed practice by 2022. In this formative decade, Burke’s topical concerns and aesthetic manifestations would catch fire, leading to a prolific practice across topics, themes, media, and form. The beginnings of this range were introduced in the wide array of work exhibited in the MAC Hope for a Better Past collection. In Cycle and Super Mario, Burke almost predictably explores thematic threads of legacy and inheritance in regard to performance of masculinity in working-class districts.14 Three figures, males at various stages of development, are positioned on small foundations that are

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mounted and extended from the gallery wall. In each phase, we are introduced to male roles, as father, as youth, and as paramilitary. In this series, Burke eases into explicit exploration and commentary on the inheritance of violence and sectarian hatred that is passed down through generations as readily as family stories, religion, political positioning, and trade. Akin to this exploration but moving into a new realm is a piece like Super Mario. The paramilitary man, tattooed, over-muscled, and donning a balaclava sits with legs sprawled on a flowered settee. His gun and cell phone are exchanged for a video game controller, he is the paragon of the new paramilitary-man turned gangster. Idle time and vestiges of aggression play out on videogame screens and in the streets of Belfast, devoid of the political righteousness used to justify violent acts through paramilitary activity in the coverture of the Troubles. The Peace Agreement has been signed, amnesty was given to former combatants and yet the “struggle” persists in domestic spheres. The political revolution that has shifted and changed to deliver a version of peace and democratic society that perhaps falls short of all parties’ vision, is traded for the fantastical and the controllable realm of video games at home. Much to the torment of whoever might inhabit this space, Super Mario suggests the absurd and surreal of lived experience in post-conflict Belfast. This is a working-class experience, a world away from the well-heeled community explored in Archive: Libsburn Road. Burke’s commentary is still understated, much like the lens work of her earlier practice, but explicit in its studious interrogation and delicate critique of the state of the world in her local Belfast community. Super Mario is both absurd and deeply troubling. It is the legacy of decades of conflict and loss. It speaks to the potential of new and unexpected losses in a generation of men left with unsatisfactory results of their perceived sacrifice and the potential for a lost generation, unsure of where to place themselves in a new political, cultural, and economic context. These are the men whose suicide rates skyrocket in the decades following the 1998 Peace Agreement. These are the men who escape the realities of post-conflict Northern Ireland through a seemingly perpetual adolescence—without trade, without calling, virtually rudderless in a world that keeps changing all around them.15

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Arthur Horgan Ursula Burke 2022 “Burke’s sculptural work is layered with historical art references, elements of the surreal and often present dark and humorous constructions,” according to the exhibit notes. A recurrent theme lies in the subversion of traditional concepts of the media such as porcelain or embroidery, when placed within a fine art context. Through her work, she realizes provocative, playful, and often surreal representations that not only challenge established codes of signification but also reference socio-political concerns.”16 In Houses , we see this play on “established codes of signification” and “reference [to] sociopolitical concerns” in the Northern Irish community, fifteen years after the Good Friday Peace Agreement. In the neat and carefully crafted rowhouses, complete with exposed gable ends, Burke suggests a surreal alternative to the real political entrenchment of the Belfast estate.17 Gable ends adorned with murals that illustrate paramilitary iconography, nationalist myths, and menacing reminders of a territorial claim by historically divided sectarian communities are guarded by paramilitary organizations turned gangs after the Peace Agreement throughout Belfast and Derry. In Burke’s rendering, they are replaced with intricate floral patterning

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in a broad range of color palettes. Carefully rendered curbstones signal aesthetic play rather than ownership, historically associated with these rituals and practice to claim tracks of land throughout the North.

Ursula Burke, Houses , 2013 Porcelain, glaze, decals and gold lustre Dimensions: 32 cm × 14 cm × 11 cm The MAC, Belfast In The Three Gracies , we see working-class young women valorized and celebrated for their aesthetics, camaraderie, and performance of identity. Their aesthetic expression is presented in trending accessories; colorful handbags, sunglasses, and hairbands to play on colorful briefs. Their comportment suggests fast fashion and its ready presentation through cheap buys at local shops like Primark. The Gracies, a band of young women, show how they opt in to trends as forms of individual expression. Burke’s rendition offers the contradiction of female embodiment and the muse, alluded to in the Gracies versus the Greek mythological Graces (Charites). She mines tensions between individual expression and joining mainstream culture for young women faced with conflicting expectations for the role that they will each play in a rapidly changing social context in Northern Ireland. She attends to classical tropes of objectification and valorization of the muse in The Graces. But Burke’s Gracies also interrogate contemporary real and perceived valorization and shaming of women in this conservative culture. This is a cultural and social context that is

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dominated by Christian mores that can be interpreted and manifest in confining roles for women in Catholic and Protestant communities alike. Women are put on cultural and political pedestals. They are positioned as inspirational, perhaps even heroic. But they are also still treated as subservient or as flippant, silly objects of sexualization or fetishization, by males who historically dominate in positions that overpower their female counterparts. In The Bonfires , Burke’s technical prowess and stinging critique betray the brilliance of an evolving practice. In these intricate structures, Burke pays homage to the engineering feat captured in the Northern Irish Protestant valorization and celebration of King William of Orange’s defeat of the Catholic King James on July 12th each year. The marching season is a public display of triumphalism where Northern Irish streets feature sizeable promenades of Orangemen and flute and drum bands. This annual ritual celebrates the reign of a Protestant monarchy in the North of Ireland. The night before the ceremonious march, neighborhoods throughout the region are adorned with bonfires, built from shipping palettes that are stacked skyward as amateur structural engineers compete for the highest and most intricate bonfires with rival and neighboring estates. The night of bonfire burnings serves as a pseudoMardi Gras, ahead of the somber public promenades, tributes, sermons, and speeches that are features of the July 12th celebration of King William’s victory.18 The bonfires are notorious displays of Protestant toxic masculinity; loud music, alcohol, and codified misogynistic revelry. But they are also neighborhood celebrations. The bonfires include block parties where young children, parents, and grandparents congregate and celebrate the triumphalist culture together. This night is the pinnacle of Unionist culture each year. It has even recently manifested in Orange Fest in Belfast, as the revelry is branded and advertised, to tourists and local communities alike, as a cultural affair.19 The effort to bring tourists into the fold speaks to explicit attempts to normalize the displays. These are gestures that seek to garner support for supremacist visions and structural subjugation of minority populations. These were defining features of Northern Ireland’s cultural and political past that the Orange Order seeks to repackage and present as seemingly innocuous culture, despite its powerful and historically aggressive overtones. In the daytime hours leading up to the celebrations the bonfires are guarded by armed youths. The structures are built, layer by layer, for weeks ahead of the scheduled burning. Vicious competition in size,

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height, and general presence from one bonfire structure to the next plays out by neighborhood and historically, by paramilitary territoriality and influence. The bonfires are typically topped with a Union Jack flag that is then replaced with a Tricolour Irish flag that will be burned with the structure. Although prohibited by city and town councils, other materials are burned in the structure alongside the typically stolen shipping pallets and flags. These include used tires, effigies of local and national Irish nationalist politicians and leaders, and campaign posters from the nationalist communities. The structural engineering of these structures is complex. It is certainly a testament to the builders’ ingenuity, creativity, and technical prowess. But to replicate the cultural, political, and social resonance of these structures in artistic form is a feat of engineering and creative ingenuity as well.

Ursula Burke Bonfire 2013 Parian Porcelain. Dimensions: 52 cm × 24 cm × 22 cm The MAC, Belfast In the porcelain sculptures at the MAC, we see Burke’s practice take on a form and process that evolves into a sophisticated and deliberate methodology. In these pieces, the ideas take shape moving from realist documentation to exercises in surrealism. These readily then slide into stinging critique. As the surreal emerges in the Bonfire the damage caused by this yearly, outrageous ritual becomes apparent. Burke’s Bonfire vibrates with mythical and political symbolism, from the classical period to

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the contemporary. Parian porcelain casts a haunting timeless quality with its white allusions to marble and carvings of the classical period. Shipping pallets are expertly layered in the sculpture, intertwined with monstrous, disembodied appendages, fanged plant life, poultry, and unidentifiable flags. In the height of flag disputes, contentious permit applications for bonfire sites, and parade routes, Burke’s intricate renderings are a counternarrative to the brute force and will-to-power playing out in the post-conflict political and legislative spheres in Northern Ireland. Burke’s works offer a pause. They invite the viewer to consider the nonsensical aspects of lived experience in post-conflict Northern Ireland. The sculptures codify the seeming farce of perpetuating these parades of triumph and defeat in a society that seeks healing from its most recent wounds.20 Methods for achieving the structural integrity and powerful aesthetic renderings of works like Bonfire hearken back to Burke’s ingenuity with the limited materials of her youth. Unlike the rotten brushes and colored pencil overlay needed to achieve her visions as a secondary school student, Burke’s practice in porcelain speaks to a relentless doggedness evident in her practice. Conceptually and theoretically she has a vision. The craft has to evolve to meet that vision. When casting, Burke focuses primarily on the integrity of the undercut. “An undercut is an area where you place plaster on an object and when it dries, you want it to release from the object easily but if you don’t understand the undercuts the plaster will not release, [it] gets stuck and the mold will not work,” she states. “You are essentially covering the objects in pieces of plaster, one by one, like a three-dimensional puzzle until the whole object is covered in plaster.” A project like The Bonfire, involves casting and building individual pallets into the architecture of the bonfires. Other components like the appendages, toothed plants, and chickens, demonstrate the complexity and skill of this practice. According to Burke, “some objects are simple and only require a two-part mold, which means two plaster parts of the puzzle like an egg or a ball. Objects like these have zero undercuts. Others are way more complex, like a head or a bust or a pallet. This is where my molds can be upwards of twenty plus parts. This is really the hardest part of the casting process and so many people fall foul of this because it so complex to understand the undercuts.”21 To build a piece like Bonfire, Ursula casts each object and carves details to render the real and surreal. She writes, “I made five separate plaster molds of the pallet. Each time I would cast five porcelain pallets, remove them from the molds. Let them dry for a bit. Then I’d take each and using a tool I’d

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scrape onto the surface of the porcelain to emphasise wood grain and cut off any waste slip, clean it up, etc. I’d repeat this meticulously until I had cast enough pallets, say twenty or thirty, I’m not sure, and then I started building them one on top of the other to mimic the bonfire architecture. I also made plaster molds of chickens, hands, feet, flags and a wild plant. Again, I cast multiples of each of these separately and started to position them coming out of the pallets like the arms and feet or on the top like the flags and the chickens. You can use the porcelain slip like a kind of glue so you can just take the cast object and stick it anywhere using the slip. This is the magic part because this gave me the freedom to make surreal objects!”22 Firing and subsequent steps required luck and grace from the kiln gods. But in the ingenuity of her method, Burke set the foundation for the most recent decade-plus of her practice. If the MAC exhibition served as a timely promise for what was to come in Burke’s career, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland British School at Rome Fellowship solidified this trajectory. In Rome Burke could live with the inspiration for her practice and its connection to the classical periods. Here she could engage with the works that inspired her at any time, whether marble sculpture or master paintings, as she visited the original works throughout the city. It was also a pivotal six-month residency where she could immerse in the practice of making. The residency was hard won. She competed and secured the fellowship but her travel to Italy was not without complications. Late in the planning processes, after schooling details were arranged for her daughter Daisey, a flat to accommodate the duo and all of the other necessary details for this temporary move, Burke learned that children were not permitted to join the resident artist. Specifically, children are not permitted on the premises of the British School at Rome. As a single parent, Burke was in a difficult position. All arrangements had been made to ensure Daisey could accompany her for the duration of the residency. Although the limitations of the rules were understood, and rudimentary steps were in place to visit this policy by the British School in Rome administration, with an eye towards more inclusive changes, the policy stood in place for the duration of Burke’s stay in Rome. In another example of deep family commitments to Ursula’s evolving career Linda, Burke’s eldest sister, offered to care for Daisey. This would afford Burke the opportunity to take the formative and prestigious residency in Rome, supported by the Northern Irish Council. Daisey supported Burke’s career and understood the significance of this opportunity for her mother. In a gesture of solidarity and support, Daisey

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readily agreed to move temporarily to live with Linda’s family for the sixmonth period. This meant moving out of Belfast to the Republic and a temporary change in school attendance for a significant period of time. It was a difficult set of family decisions rife with its own challenges. But the commitment to her future career trajectory yielded unforeseen dividends for Burke, and indirectly, Daisey and the family too. Rome was another chapter in Burke’s early wonder at immersion. Akin to the early years in Galway as a university student, Burke was fully immersed in the classical realm that would inform her next period of practice. In Rome seeds were sown for future exhibitions like So It Is at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA and The Precariat exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Dock, Leitrim and the Galway Arts Centre. In Rome Burke could study the classical marble that inspired her early work in Parian porcelain. She spent six months “feeding her brain” and perfecting her craft. In So It Is , curated by John Carson, Burke was challenged to make new work in a 6-week residency. This short but incredibly productive period yielded a group exhibition with other Irish artists including Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, John Kindness, Locky Morris, Phillip Napier and Paul Seawright. This residency and exhibition led Burke’s practice to move readily from its Irish context to even deeper engagement with global concerns pertaining to abuses of power, legacies of violence and uneven development of democratic processes. After the immersive period in Rome, and the context of the Pittsburgh residency, Burke’s settled on three media for her installation in So It Is . These included a fresca, an embroidery frieze and several porcelain sculptures that came to serve as a conceptual bridge between places (Ireland and the United States) and time.

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IV. Critical Hope

Ursula Burke Embroidery Frieze—The Politicians 2015 Embroidery thread on cotton stretched over wooden frame The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh In Embroidery Frieze—The Politicians Burke composes a multi-panel series of hand-embroidered pieces. Exploiting a craft historically associated with female leisure, “each panel is drawn from documentary images sourced from the net … The use of a medieval palette of coloured threads within the work intentionally references historical period embroideries such as the Bayeux Tapestry which similarly utilize a panel or frieze narrative. Within the embroidery frame, the stitches operate in a rampant and staccato manner, following the folds in fabric or the contorted faces of the figures that offers great contrast to the controlled and minimal use of colour and line outside of the embroidery frame. The dramatic use of gesture and form, each composition fraught with tension and relating emotion, are similar to Caravaggio’s realist approach in using models, plucked from the streets. Burke’s models are plucked from the internet. The coloured threads that hang from the embroideries act as a formal

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exercise, isolating and heightening the tension between line and colour. This conceptual device creates a bridge between the frenzied battle for power within the embroidery and the gentle and alluring dissolution of that power, as it slides out of the frame and down onto the floor.”23 In each of these panels, Burke depicts the symbolic and abstract practice of governance through parliamentary or congressional hearings as they deteriorate to blows in physical combat. The carefully stitched compositions are vivid. They suggest tensions of movement and arrest, disorder, and male combative aggression as the fresco assembles examples from throughout the world. The commonality as well as the particular “incidents” pulled from YouTube clips of disorder on parliamentary floors captures tumult, messiness, and passion in the practice of governance. The frieze also highlights fissures and fragility in democratic governance. Burke’s meditations on abuses of power interrogate these experiments in rule, these attempts at democracy in practice. She depicts shortcomings and concerns with representative democracy and its thin veil that barely covers raw will-to-power in outposts throughout the world.24 Working with a medieval palette, painstakingly composing the scenes, stitch-bystitch, Burke plays with elements of movement and pause. She captures the sense of desperation in the resort to blows as well as the raw passion that agitates and commandeers reason in each scene. These are moments of reckless abandon, where men perpetrate violence in venues that call for composure, sober dialogue, and discipline. The public fervor appears in delicate, feminine craft, historically associated with domestic interiors. In The Wounding , a collection of busts that catalogue a litany of physical abuses and acts of violence, Burke instigates interrogations of violence and tolerance of violence in contemporary societies the world over. With an emphasis on violence perpetuated on predominantly female bodies, Burke broadens her critique to systemic and individual incidences of violence on black men and women, and white minoritized male figures as well. In a gravitational pull on antiquity and classical tropes in the West, Burke complicates relationships to the iconic and aspirational testaments to human forms in these codifications of Western sculpture. With a variety of pigments, forms, and distortion of the ideal human forms through documentation of violence, the variety of Bruised Busts command a reckoning with instances of violence in contemporary and historical culture. In this series, Burke depicts violence brought on female and black bodies as a persistent practice in the West, a precedent as prevalent as aggrandizing human forms in antiquity. She offers critical commentary on the

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public and private proliferation of gendered, sectarian and racially based violence, offering oblique and direct connections to the rise of Black Lives Matter as a domestic and international social justice movement in the United States, throughout Europe and in the United Kingdom. The work predates the #METOO movement but it touches on its infiltration of culture, politics and lived experience in Ireland, in the United States, and the world over. Burke’s meditation on violent acts and sustained abuse on female, black, and minoritized bodies alludes to the tensions of social justice movements that are valorized in the press and by governmental officials yet seek to redress the sins of colonial pasts and the legacies of systemic racism and sexism. The collection launches its quiet but explicit critique in the midst of a call for reckoning. While allusions to global solidarity with Black Lives Matter and concerns associated with police brutality in the United States and Britain, as well as other locations in the world, initially informed early pieces in this collection, more recent developments that catalog the severity and systemic nature of these forms of figurative and literal violence are present here as well.

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Ursula Burke Bruised Bust 2017 Parian porcelain and stain. Dimensions: 36 cm × 14 cm × 15 cm The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh In late 2019 and early 2020, Burke undertook a residency in Paris that would cascade into a dual exhibition, A False Dawn, at Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris and the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Echoes and departures from So It Is and The Precariat were in clear evidence as Burke’s confidence in political commentary and meaningful engagement with Irish and global political contexts were on full display. Burke’s work in Parian porcelain and delicate Belleek-like renderings of pigment, paint, and gold had already given way to the use of white and

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black porcelain in The Wounding . Delicate, carefully cast features of the sculptures were blunted and damaged as the iconic and ideal allusions to human form were bludgeoned with evidence of physical and systemic abuse of individual bodies and collective identities. In The Precariat Burke explored uncertainty, as she removed the veil of protection promised but unevenly delivered in representative democratic systems. The Precariat considers the dissolution of a world order that suggests a liberal agenda, systems, and policies built to educate populations, and ensure access to healthcare, opportunities for employment, and material advancement. Burke documents the unraveling of these ideals; a reckoning of late capitalism that has not yielded equity in politics or in access to equitable and sustainable lifestyles. Instead, the Precariat captures a sense of unease. The threats to certainty and stability are numerous but it is not clear which threat will fall or when. In A False Dawn Burke returns to the surreal and the mythical. It is emblematic of a significant shift, yet again, in her practice. As she pushes the forms and medium of the work, as well as the pieces that are exhibited, to reflect the sophistication and complexity of what she sees and wishes to interrogate in the world that informs her work, the media shift again. In A False Dawn, we see features of needlework combined with porcelain in a variety of hues, including dark black and medieval thread palettes. There is a deliberate combination of hardness and softness in the materials and forms of the sculptures. In the content, we see a dual approach in the surreal and mythical response to the very real unraveling and uncertainty of domestic and international political contexts. Burke responds to the power of late-Capitalism and its generation of inequity. She considers the rise of populism and its haunting echoes of fascist extremism in earlier periods of the twentieth century. In the Paris exhibition a truncheon is topped with a bust, and the stick is wrapped in medieval tapestry. The face of enforcement, perceptions of justice, and the wielding power of governance are alluded to in the humanoid manifestation of power. This instrument bludgeons. It manifests the power of will and its potential for abuse. An Augur hangs from a beam—glass eyes piercing an imagined horizon. Wide, woven yarn tendrils compose its fat belly, drooping like overripe fruit as the figure attempts to divine or devise a possible future.25 In the Ulster Museum, Blue Sphinx guards the entryway. She sits regal and poised in vibrant blue. Her composition is mixed in woven yarn and porcelain, an enigma of comfort and strength who tests those seeking entry. She protects the exhibition, its treasures, and its narrative.

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A False Dawn was a major exhibition at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland. It opened in February 2020 for about a month before Belfast locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The exhibit reopened for another two months in 2021 as the city eased Covid19 restrictions. Strangely, the exhibition’s opening was contemporaneous to Burke’s departure from Belfast. Daisey was nestled into her own university studies. Burke’s career was soaring with various prestigious fellowships and residencies lined up for the spring of 2020 onward. The next phase in theoretical and technical practice was underway. Porcelain castings and embroidery encapsulated in So It Is and Precariat gave way to mixed media in Blue Sphinx. Medieval weaving was a possible new direction to extend the range and scale that Burke undertook in The Politicians embroidery frieze. Burke’s work from The Wounding , one of the Bruised Bust pieces, was acquired by the Ulster Museum for its permanent collection. Public recognition as well as practical support was catching alight. Burke had been awarded the Golden Fleece Award in 2018, the Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award, and the Freelands Award in 2020. Other awards ensued, including the major Markievicz Award by the Arts Council Ireland and the Decade of Centenaries. In the midst of a global crisis, more than two years of rolling shutdowns, global health emergencies, and its ensuing political and economic uncertainty, Burke returned to Tipperary. She rented a flat on a farm just outside of Cashel, and built an in-home studio to weather the storms that her Augur seemed to see brewing on the horizon. Entering another critical stage in her career, Burke explored medium and form from 2020 to 2022 with a return to a community neighboring her native Clonmel. It was a period of acute uncertainty worldwide and domestically in Ireland, but like in other periods of her practice, Burke thrived. Quietly observing the tumult outside, Burke responded in kind. Using her hands and a deep, well-practiced exercise in observation and intuitive exploration honed by her years in Belfast, she considered how her practice might respond to the world around her. A veteran cultural critic at this point in her career, the monumental collection, Supplicant, was exhibited at VISUAL Center for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland. In this exhibition, Burke presents a roaring commentary on local and global concerns rendered in her own classic fashion. Working across media, experimenting with palette and stretching concepts of time as the past and present reverberate in each piece and the exhibition’s orchestration of relationships between pieces, Burke returned to questions that she had

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explored since her lens work in the early 2000s. Representations and roles for women, the duality of resistance and empathy, contentious and deeply respectful relationships with the classical and antiquity. The work pays homage to the West at the same time that it explodes Western, European and Irish biases. The exhibition interrogates the historic in concert with the surreal, the fantastical and the mythological. In the face of what Burke describes as “a wave … sweeping around the globe where discontent and disillusion in the establishment are ripe,” Burke asks, “How can the phenomenon of populism and the rise in extreme versions of nationalism be seen not as an aberration or singular event but as a symptom of something much larger? Where and how do we find meaning when the structures upon which we anchor our lives, such as family, religion and community, are being eroded?” Twin blue sphinxes anchor the exhibition. A protestor, reposed but ready to rise again tears streaming, captures the resolve of resistance in the form of a porcelain bust. But the body, poised to stand again, is clothed in carefully knit yarn. A caryatid, poised and resolute, tear-streaked but erect holds up the exhibition in the rear. Burke’s foray into tapestry leads to a softly hued and muted pastoral. Inspired by the myth of Pope Joan, a birth scene is depicted atop a moving horse. In the varied pieces, Burke calls for an interrogation of our inheritance, our legacies and our myths. She asks us to consider the ethical concerns of the next generations’ plights in the mess of our political and social contemporary. The critiques in the work are powerful. They are of an age where it seems all aspects of our humanity, consciousness, political governance, and relationships to culture are under grave and explicit threat. It is a dark and foreboding aesthetic. But it is not an exhibition without hope.

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Ursula Burke The Protestor 2021 Parian porcelain, fiberglass, fleece wool, and glass wax. Dimensions: life size VISUAL, Carlow Nestled in acknowledgment of the myriad of real and perceived challenges, the forces that bear down on individuals and groups alike, the positionality of sculptures, the arrangement of the work suggests strength, resistance, and power in The Supplicant. From the sphinxes who demand solutions to the riddles of our time to the caryatid who holds up the backdrop of the exhibition. Critique is nestled in the necessity of preserving hope.

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Ursula Burke The Protestor 2021 Parian porcelain, fiberglass, fleece wool, and glass wax. Dimensions: life size VISUAL, Carlow Like Burke’s work almost a decade later, Richard Johnson acknowledges the power of hope in the context of a critical crisis. In “Optimism of the Intellect?: Hegemony and Hope,” published in Soundings in 2013, he touches on the longevity of our current moment of crisis. In an effort to describe hope and its contemporary political manifestations, he writes: There is nothing fixed or natural, moreover, about the goals of hope or aspiration. People can aspire otherwise. Individuals can and do find satisfaction and fulfilment in sociability, curiosity and creating. They can and do choose to care for others, to co-operate in the long-term interests of a group or community, and even take on responsibilities for the planet and its future. These forms of aspiration are richly present today, though usually directed to very specific objects, persons or causes. They lack a larger social ambition or collective confidence and will. Yet together they represent the emergence of a larger viable future.26

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In the protestor and her position, glancing, tear strewn, upward, Burke suggests that while the protest indicates darkness and a need for resistance, she is not defeated in her seated position. She will rise. And she will rise, again and again. The sphinxes, beautiful and battle-worn, pose the riddles of our time. They are suggestively pliant and resilient in Burke’s decision to combine soft and hard materials in these mixed media sculptures. They embody features of what Johnson articulated in language almost a decade before. On the riddles of an interdependent economy and politics he writes: Globalisation in general, but especially the post-imperial migrations to metropolitan cities, has created new cultural proximities, a new education about ‘difference’ and a new possibility of political co-ordination between subordinated populations in different parts of the world, aided by new communication technologies. The choice is imperatively posed between racist and religious-ethnic exclusion, antagonism and actual warfare and a syncretic living together, if not in harmony at least in dialogue with multiple others. The key condition for the latter is the serious pursuit of greater justice for all. Decisions about these routes to either catastrophe or human development are as important to international relations and governance as to national identities.27

As the caryatid cries, buckling under the crushing pressure of our times, she is also regal and structurally necessary like the architectural marvels of her antecedents in antiquity. Just like the caryatids of old, whom we visit with curiosity and awe, she stands. Her color palette is gentle, feminine and light. Her features are delicate. And yet … she is strong, statuesque, stationary in a sea of tumult. A relic of Europe, the West, its beauty and force, wavering but standing. She is flawed but present.

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Ursula Burke Peach Caryatid 2021 Porcelain, underglaze, transparent gloss, fiberglass, fleece wool, embroidery thread, and glass wax Dimensions: Life size VISUAL, Carlow As Johnson suggests, hope is perhaps nonsensical, and strength is unlikely, yet it persists. To be optimistic, beyond a romantic flourish, isn’t fashionable or stylish, and it risks disappointment and the charge of foolishness. It is cooler to be a critic. Yet precisely what are missing today are hopeful stories about the future. These must express our dreams and desires and correspond to the full range of our experience, including the inadmissible parts. They must also correspond to the real potentialities of structural change – what

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Bloch calls the ‘objectively possible’ … we need a larger Narrative of Hope that reaches out for a new global future, a new form of human development, while taking full account of all the pressures towards a civilisational collapse.28

Ursula Burke Peach Caryatid 2021 Porcelain, underglaze, transparent gloss, fiberglass, fleece wool, embroidery thread, and glass wax. Dimensions: Life size VISUAL, Carlow Burke’s ever-energetic, fierce and thoughtful practice captures this hope. It is powerful, recognizable and brave. Fantasy and the surreal are connected to the blessings and the concerns of our reality, they allow us to engage with the dark alongside the light. In Burke’s practice, we witness an interrogation of ourselves. We see a reckoning with Ireland

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and with the world. Her work is relentless in its exploration, and seemingly limitless in its pursuit to carry us forward with care, integrity, and strength. She faces down the biggest questions of our time in the richness of our contradictions of the local and the global, the light and the dark, the bleak and the possible.

Arthur Horgan Ursula Burke 2022

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Interviews with Ursula Burke throughout 2020, 2021 and 2022. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Akin to programs like Art Portfolio Preparation sponsored by the Tipperary Education and Training Board, https://tipperary.etb.ie/fur ther-education/course/art-portfolio-preparation/. Interviews with Ursula Burke throughout 2020, 2021 and 2022. Ibid. Email exchange with Burke, May 2022. Ursula Burke, SOURCE, Issue 27 Summer 2001, https://www.source. ie/archive/issue27/is27contents.php.Ew

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

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Interviews with Ursula Burke throughout 2020, 2021 and 2022. Ibid. Ibid. Ursula Burke & Daniel Jewesbury, Belfast Exposed Exhibitions, https:// www.belfastexposed.org/exhibitions/archive-lisburn-road/ Ursula Burke, Hope for a Better Past, https://www.ursulaburke.com/Hop eforaBetterPast See Purdy, Finn, McDade, Harris & Winter. Loyalist and Republican Perspectives on Educational Underachievement in Northern Ireland. CREU Report, May 2021, https://www.stran.ac.uk/wp-content/upl oads/2021/05/Loyalist-and-Republican-Perspectives-in-EducationalUnderachievement-in-Northern-Ireland-CREU-Report-May-2021.pdf. Exhibition notes for Hope for a Better Past, https://www.ursulaburke. com/HopeforaBetterPast. Bill Rolston. Drawing Support Series (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications, 1992–2021). See: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/bibdbs/murals/rolston1.htm. Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997). Lauren Harte, “Orange Order ‘Looking Forward to the Next 100 Years’ Ahead of NI Centennial Parade,” Belfast News, May 27, 2022, https:// www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/orange-order-looking-forwardnext-24077821. See work by Neil Jarman and Dominic Bryan, respectively. Email exchange with Ursula Burke, May 6, 2022. Ibid. So It Is The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA, https://www.ursulaburke. com/MattressFactoryMuseum See Jennifer Keating, “Making Theory: Aesthetic Roadmaps into the Future?” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, Volume 9, No. 1, 2020, https://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/content-images/AmendJISS9.1.pdf See Ursula Burke workshop, https://www.goldenthreadgallery.co.uk/pro ject/gtg-artists-present-ursula-burke-from-canova-to-de-chirico/ Richard Johnson, “Optimism of the Intellect? Hegemony and Hope,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, No. 54, Summer 2013, 63. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 63.

CHAPTER 6

Closing and End Note by Sahana Thirumazhusai

Just off the shore of Achill Island in late July 2022, I dipped into the frigid water. “Get down and get moving,” was the sagely, though breathless, advice that I received from Rita Duffy as she too negotiated the freezing sea. With a sparkly eye the night before she had warned me that she would go for a quick swim in the morning. She would fit it in before Njaimeh would photograph her and ahead of our last interview. Rather than wait until she was ready, I asked if I could join in. Heeding her advice to get going, I paddled and kicked as quickly as I could to stave off the chill. My muscles immediately heated, a prickly sensation of brash heat under cold skin. It confused the senses to feel the burning warmth of exertion, while my skin stung against the frigid, salty water. Duffy and other regular bathers discussed local concerns: English classes for the recently arrived Ukrainian refugee families who stayed in local holiday cottages. They were primarily women and children, as most men were forced to stay to fight the Russian aggressors. Duffy suggested that she could bring art supplies to run an art session. It might be a moment of productive quiet, where no one had to speak. Neither the Ukrainian arrivals, nor their willing hosts, would have to worry about the imprecision of communicating across language systems. Everyone could take a break from the well-intended, although exhausting, verbal exchange.

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After the swim, a warm shower and breakfast, I was alert and reflected on the contrast as I watched Njaimeh take photographs. Duffy showed me an array of projects in process and in workbooks as Njaimeh continued to document with her camera. In one book there was a series of small paintings of a phoenix. It appeared several times, in various hues, with metallic embellishments to set off its plumage in luster. A common feature in Irish mythology and a regular symbol of political renewal in Ireland, the phoenix is a trope that connects Ireland to other heritages that share the myth as well; in China, in Iran, in Greece, and elsewhere. The productive contrasts emblematic of this myth, a powerful creature springing from ashes, still smoldering from destructive fire, are pertinent now as well. The phoenix embodies seemingly simple truths in our current climate worldwide, where we are challenged to responsibly bear witness to a myriad of political extremism, violent atrocities and ecological disasters. We have to register these ills, hold perpetrators responsible and devise innovative solutions to the challenges that relentlessly fall on our literal and figurative doorsteps, in order to envision and embody our social connections anew. But to do so completely, we need to hope. Optimism is the productive contrast to social challenges. Hope is the unlikely energy that emerges from darkness. Beauty, delicacy, and the prospect of human connections, counter the bleak and heavy features of our time. In Portraits of Practice: Rita Duffy, Mairéad McClean, Paula McFetridge, and Ursula Burke we explore each artist’s spirited approach, the driving qualities of each woman’s work that attends to the oblique and the central features of the society in which they each live and work. Their individual practices are deeply critical of social injustice and infringements on human dignity, yet much of their respective work is also laden with hope. Their interrogations are critically powerful but their expressions and visions are layered with levity. Each adopts the absurd, the satirical, and the fantastical with productive contrasts of delicacy, power, and truth. We witness how each woman responds and attempts to make sense of relationships to complexities in the world that we each inhabit. Their poignant expressions can shift what we see or what we might be able to imagine, as their work nudges our orientation to reality. As John Carson notes, Duffy, McClean, McFetridge, and Burke pay little heed to fashion or trends. Their authentic utterances and expressions transcend momentary concerns. Even as their work attends to particular events, in specific places and time, their vision and precise interventions invoke the timeless, the poetic, and always, the strong. In Mieke Bal’s

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Of What We Cannot Speak, she describes the features of political work that she engages in regard to the practice of Doris Salcedo. Interpreting Michael Taussig’s condemnation of the corruption of the political, she writes, The political is drugged by the habit of violence. Politics permeates the political, and the two, far from aiding dispute, make antagonistic discussion impossible. Antagonism is violently silenced, which de facto kills the political.1

As they emerged from the direct threat of violence endemic to conflict in Ireland and Northern Ireland, public health crises like Covid-19 or legislative injustice, features of Duffy’s, McClean’s, McFetridge’s and Burke’s work enliven “antagonistic discussion” in their respective practices. But they do so on their own terms. They each weave past the prospect of politics “drugged up by the habit of violence.” And in their respective, innovative approach, they find a way into the productive tensions between what Lippard describes as distinctions between “those who are socially concerned and those who are socially involved.”2 Moving in and out of projects, attending to a myriad of social concerns and challenges, Duffy, McClean, McFetridge, and Burke remind us that their practices are neither monolithic or static. As individuals they respond and shift, they grow and they evolve. Even in the face of the critical violence of current times, each woman’s resolve, commitment, dynamic inquiry and antagonism is embodied with grace. She is fierce in her own “socially concerned” way. I hope you will continue to follow Duffy, McClean, McFetridge and Burke. I expect their stars will continue to rise. I also encourage you to find innovative makers in communities far and near. There are countless stories to uncover, to learn, and to explore. In closing, we consider our own role, our own responsibility to pause, to look, and to look again. As we reflect on the rich body of work that Duffy, McClean, McFetridge, and Burke offer, we can consider what we do with the newfound perspective that we might gain from spending time with each of these artists’ work. What aspects of our reality have shifted in its meaning, in the urgency of our concern as we more deeply engage and reflect on features of the world around us? In this responsible stance, what comes of the imagining, in expressions of the possible?

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I close this book not with my own voice but with my former student, Sahana Thirumazhusai. Like Njaimeh Njie and John Carson, who see the world and its angles from perspectives that I cannot quite see, Sahana offers a voice and an orientation to the artists’ work that is salient and pertinent to the prospect of aesthetic antagonism that is delicately and forcefully leveraged to call and make a change. We close this book, therefore, with the voice of youth, an emblem of who will inherit the challenges tomorrow that, for better or worse, we lay forth today.

6.1

Endnote

By Sahana Thirumazhusai In the aftermath of a conflict, affected communities will attempt to seek justice, reconciliation, peace, and more. The processes that are used in such endeavors are often referred to as transitional justice. Over the past several decades, transitional justice has emerged as a way to seek stability. Contending with a legacy of violence is often a necessary step to rebuilding trust and ensuring safety in the future. Transitional justice can range from establishing truth commissions to conducting formal trials to utilizing traditional practices to induce conversation within a community. Conflict tears apart communities, and transitional justice works to mend that. Yet the legacy that is being dealt with is often difficult to untangle. It’s the nature of violence to spread and obfuscate, and in the aftermath, understanding the past can be challenging. This is especially true in scenarios where the end of a conflict does not mark the end of the political or social tensions that precipitated violence. This is the case in Northern Ireland, where even today tensions exist about the political future of the region. Despite being contemporary with South Africa and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Northern Ireland did not undergo a formal, overarching transitional justice initiative after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. While there have been various inquiries, trials, and other attempts at formal truth seeking, they all pertained to specific facets of the conflict. As such, conceptions of the past—of the Troubles—are built on many things. It’s based on the lived experiences of former combatants, victims, bystanders, and those who occupy the gray area in between. It’s informed by the families who lost loved ones during the conflict, and those who share their stories. It’s also based on official,

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publicly released information and the politics of the present. The past is deeply contested in Northern Ireland to this day. Time is a core element of transitional justice. It is dealing with the past, in the present, as we head into the future. But the past is not static. As we move through the present, our conception of the past changes, informed by new knowledge and perspectives. It’s a cyclical relationship. We do this for our individual stories. As we experience life, we think about our own experiences. As we reach the age where loved ones were at pivotal moments, we gain new insights into their experiences. Each reflection on the past is an invitation to reimagine it with a different understanding. Not always better, but indelibly different all the same. We do this as humankind too. We examine our origins, and look at scientific and anthropological evidence to reconfigure our own stories. In the context of a conflict, that cyclical relationship becomes more complex. Rather than reflection being driven by evolution, reconceiving the past can become a necessity due to new unexpected revelations. For example, since the Good Friday agreement was signed, critical revelations about government collusion with paramilitaries during the Troubles have cast a new light on certain events. Those who were impacted by the collusion, either directly or by losing loved ones, are forced to reconceive their past to include these revelations. Unlike in transitional justice scenarios with formal truth seeking, these revelations can be unexpected and staggering. They can force a reckoning with the past on an unsuspecting population who perhaps thinks that the past will remain in the past. As such, their repercussions can directly threaten the very stability sought through transitional justice. This is especially concerning in areas where the past is already contested. Memorialization of the past is a popular transitional justice method, and a concept that predates the term. It is the underlying motivation behind tombs to remember those long gone, oral epics passed from storyteller to storyteller, and it is the intention behind monuments that enshrine wars of the past. Memorials can be entirely grassroots, conceived and created within the communities that were directly affected. They make tangible our yearning to understand and come to terms with what has happened. They conceptualize events that are too painful, too graphic for us to truly imagine. Memorialization is a part of processing the past, especially the difficult parts. Memorialization of disaster, destruction, and suffering are popular because they allow a tremendous, community-wide feeling to be captured. It is meant to allow remembrance and catharsis,

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a shield against the very real fear that what a community went through will eventually be forgotten or repeated due to this periodic cultural and political amnesia. It is particularly key when the past is contested, as it allows specific versions of memory to become preserved for the future. And yet, by enshrining the past for perpetuity, we capture its conception at a moment in time. It is fixed, immutable, and unresponsive to changes in historical perception in the collective memory. This is a core difficulty with memorialization. It contributes to peacebuilding and resolution within communities, but when combined with the previously described forced reckoning that can occur due to unexpected revelations, its fixed nature can become a liability. It cannot easily change to incorporate new perceptions of the past. Some memorials can still serve their purpose. For example, an inscription of victims lost will still commemorate those deaths. But in other cases, the memorialization can have a neutral or negative impact on stability, rather than its original purpose as a gesture towards resolution and potential social healing. Memorialization as a transitional justice method has occurred far and wide in relation to the Troubles. From murals to memorial gardens, there are sites of remembrance scattered across Northern Ireland. But those sites too can face the same issue of no longer reflecting the emotions of those whose past they are meant to preserve. The power of the art chronicled in this book is that they exist within this oscillation between past and present that is the core of transitional justice. Each of the women profiled in this book has revisited the contested past through their work. Each revisitation brings with it their current perspective, one that is impacted by their growth, their community’s evolution, and any new information they have about their past. The artists invite the viewer to engage with that re-visitation, and to do so with whatever additional layers the viewer brings from their present. Mairead McClean’s No More does exactly this—it intersperses footage of past violence with artifacts of her childhood during that time. It contends with the actions and choices of the government that directly led to the internment of her father. It combines her lived experiences as a child during upheaval with her perspective as an adult who understands so much more about why and how that happened. It is an introspection of the past rooted in the knowledge of the present, a recontextualization that brings new insight into old pain. Since No More was released, more revelations about government collusion have emerged. And yet, due to its positioning in that temporal relationship, it is as poignant today as

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it was in 2014. It provides the viewer a chance to attend to their own perceptions of the past, and to build on the conceptions it offers. Rita Duffy’s work on Guantanamo Bay is another example of that temporal relationship. It is a reflection on the human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States Government in Guantanamo Bay, but as previously described by Keating in Chapters 2 and 3, it “invokes a legacy of abuse of power and justification of state-sponsored violence as a form of retribution in the United States and in the United Kingdom.” Revisiting that legacy through one of its current evolutions creates a point of interaction with that past. It pushes the viewer to contend with the role of incarceration in their own present. Since 2009, the United States and other nations have been forced to conduct some reflection on incarceration, and how it perpetuates power hierarchies and creates cyclical abuse. While those impacts were not a secret in 2009 when Rita Duffy created this work, she could not have predicted the cultural reckoning that would occur due to the Black Lives Matter movement. And yet, again her artwork already exists in this intersection of the past and the present. As such, it can serve as a focal point for these emerging critical conversations about race and incarceration. The work allows the viewer deliberate space to revisit the past. These individual works of art have tremendous value, but so does an artist’s body of work. Each artwork is a memorial in its own right of a certain moment and perspective and idea. But in a collective context, the nature of their thoughts and perspectives over time are showcased. Transitional justice deals with peace. Many transitional justice initiatives focus on those affected by conflict and their connection to the troubled past. They often immortalize them and their feelings at that moment. The work can preserve it. Truth-seeking commissions, for example, produce literal tons of documentation and affidavits and transcripts—but those commissions also all eventually come to a close. And when they do, the experience they chronicle stops as well. These artists’ bodies of work, therefore, portray a unique insight to perspective over time. Contending with the past is a topic that comes up again and again in transitional justice, even as it looks towards the future. Balancing both in the present is one of the core challenges of pursuing meaningful mechanisms and processes. That challenge is made all the harder by how contested the past is. And yet, in the last few decades, Northern Ireland has seen incredible peacebuilding efforts from the communities most impacted by the Troubles. Though tensions still exist, the work done

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to commemorate, seek answers and find solutions has allowed what was once unthinkable to happen—a region of relative peace amidst political divides.

Njaimeh Njie Rita Duffy 2022

Notes 1. Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2. Lucy Lippard, “Activating Activist Art,” Circa (July–August, 1984): 14.

Correction to: Portraits of Irish Art in Practice

Correction to: J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1 Due to an unfortunate production mistake this title was published with errors initially. The necessary corrections have been carried out after which the title has been made available again.

The updated versions of the front matter and chapters can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_4 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1_7

C1

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Index

A Absurd, 21, 33, 34, 43, 64, 96, 99, 100, 154, 155, 178 Abuse of power, 3, 49, 183 Activist art, 2, 6 Actor, xiii, 19, 89, 93, 111, 119, 123 Advanced Level Exams (A-Levels), 67, 77, 78, 83, 111 A False Dawn, xviii, 20, 166–168 A Line Was Drawn 2018, 96 American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 94, 103 Amnesty, 11, 155 Anatomy of Hope, xvi, 19, 56, 58 Archive: Lisburn Road, 151–153 Article 24 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Commission), 49, 75 Artistic Director, xvi, xvii, 12, 19, 115, 117, 119, 120, 126 Authenticity, 18, 148, 153 Authority, 71, 82, 93

B Ballyconnell Courthouse, 47 Ballykelly Air Base, 74 Belfast, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxix, 12, 26, 27, 29–31, 33, 36, 37, 41, 44, 47, 50, 67, 77–80, 99, 102, 106, 111–116, 118–120, 123, 126–128, 134, 136, 139, 147, 150–152, 154, 155, 162, 166, 168 Belfast Community Circus, xiv, 110, 113, 119 Belfast Exposed, xvi, xxii, 98–100, 151 Belfast Synagogue, 127, 129 Beragh, 5, 65–67, 78, 81 Binaries, 9, 42, 129, 134, 152, 153 Black Lives Matter (BLM), xv–xvii, 32, 37, 165, 183 Bog hole, 30, 50 Boland, Eavan, 41 Bonfires, xiv, 158–161

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Keating, Portraits of Irish Art in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34074-1

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INDEX

Border, xii, xv, xvi, 9, 26, 45, 47, 64, 65, 70, 71, 96, 97, 100, 131, 132 Brexit, xv, xvi, 9, 20, 45, 97, 100, 150 British Arts Council, 3 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 66, 124, 139 British Military, 5, 26, 45, 69, 70, 72, 73, 79, 89, 108, 131 British School at Rome, 161 Broadcast 2016, 85, 94 B-Specials, 70, 101 Burns, Anna, 14–16, 60 Butler, Judith, 16–18, 22, 43, 61 C Cameron, David, 131, 150 Caravaggio, 163 Carr, Garrett, xxi Carson, John, xx, xxii, xxix, 6, 162, 178, 180 Caryatid, 169, 170, 172 Casting (porcelain), 152, 160, 168 Catchpenny Twist , 115 Catto, Mike, 32 Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, 166 Ceramics, 152 Charabanc Theatre Co., 138 Circa, 1, 4–7, 21, 38, 60, 184 Civil Rights Association of Northern Ireland, 8, 67, 69, 101 Clara Bog, 30 Classical (western), xvii, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164, 169 Clonmel, Tipperary, xiv, 142–145, 147, 168 Clooney, Amal, 93 Collage, xiii, xvi, 80, 83, 88 Combatants, 11, 152, 155, 180 Community, xv, xvii, 3, 4, 10, 17, 33, 34, 37, 46, 47, 57, 77, 89, 90,

93, 98, 99, 109, 110, 112, 116, 122, 127, 129, 139, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 159, 169, 179–182 Compensation, 11, 76 Conflict, xi, xvii, xxvii, 5, 11, 36, 41, 99, 108, 115, 120, 127, 131, 150, 154, 155, 179–181, 183 Contemplating the Iceberg , 44 convictions , xvi, xvii, 12, 19, 119, 124–126, 135, 139 Craft, 19, 47, 115, 118, 132, 154, 160, 162–164 Craig, Sir James, 8, 9, 22, 60 Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, xxii, xxiii Cresswell, Tim, 118, 128, 138, 139 Critique, 1, 3, 4, 21, 39, 56, 83, 91, 94, 154, 155, 159, 165, 170 Crumlin Road Courthouse, xvi, 119, 120, 124 Cycle, 154 D Dartington School of the Arts, 112, 114 Daughter, 82, 84, 91, 106, 111, 147–149, 161 Decade of Centenaries, 10, 97, 168 Democracy, 97, 120, 164 Democratic Unionist Party, 21, 150 Derry UK City of Culture, 45, 46 Devon, England, 112, 113 Doherty, Willie, 6, 13, 162 Dolan, Jill, 124, 125, 139 Dublin, xiii, xvi, xxii, xxix, 5, 22, 44, 56, 97, 106, 109, 118, 119, 128 E Egan, Jo, 128 Eleven Plus Exam, 31 Eliot, George, 34, 56, 60

INDEX

Embodiment, 3, 13, 16–18, 97, 120, 147, 148, 157 Embroidery, xvii, 147, 154, 156, 163, 168 Embroidery Frieze – The Politicians , 163 European Commission, 49, 70, 75, 94 European Convention on Human Rights, 45, 70 European Court of Human Rights, 51, 92, 93 European Union (EU), 3, 11, 97, 131, 150 Explicit, 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 34, 43, 82, 83, 91, 95, 113, 155, 158, 165, 169 F Faulkner, Brian, 49, 69, 89 Feminist, 30, 44, 118, 119 Film, xii, xiii, xvi, 14–16, 19, 30, 64, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 93–98, 144 Fine Art, xxix, 33, 35, 58, 80, 82, 86, 147, 150, 156 Flags, 56, 154, 159–161 Fowler, Joan, 7–10, 12, 13, 16, 21, 22, 38, 41, 51 G Galway, 88, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152, 162 Galway Arts Centre, 162 Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (G-MIT), xiv, 144 Gandhi, Mahatma, 29 Gender, xii, xv, 16, 17, 38, 41, 43, 44, 124, 134 Ghana, 65, 87 Good Friday Peace Agreement, 2, 7, 11, 45, 150, 156

193

Green and Blue, 12, 20, 131 Guantanamo Amas Amat, xxiii

H Haunting, xvi, 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 123, 160, 167 Heteronormative, 41 Hoare, Lochlann, 145 Home, xiii, xix, 3, 6, 17, 26, 29, 32, 35, 66, 69–74, 76–79, 83, 84, 87, 91, 93, 107, 108, 110, 112–119, 123, 130, 135–137, 143, 151, 155, 168 Hope, xviii, xxi, 44, 56, 58, 72, 132, 135, 169, 171, 178 Houses , 156 Human rights, xv, 3, 12, 46, 49, 50, 90, 93, 95, 183 Humor, xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, 26, 32–35, 39, 46, 58 Hunger Strike, xii, 60, 108, 110

I Identity, 3, 9, 10, 12, 109, 124, 132, 134, 154, 157, 167, 172 Imperial War Museum, xxii, 44 Internment 1971, 70, 71, 102 Internment (without trial 1971), xiii, 69, 70, 88, 89 Interrogation in depth [deep interrogation], 49, 73, 102 IRA Border Campaign, 70 Irish Arts Council, 2 Irish Museum of Modern Art, xxii, 44, 87, 91 Irish Republican Army (IRA), xiv, 7, 45, 50, 69–71, 131

J Jewesbury, Daniel, 151, 152, 176

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INDEX

Jewish, xvii, 128, 130 Joyriders , 116, 118 July 12th , 158 Justice, xxx, 3, 46, 50, 92, 120, 123, 126, 165, 172, 180–183

K Kabosh Theatre Co., xxiii, 19, 126, 127 Kassabova, Kapka, 64, 65, 101 Kindness, John, 5, 7, 162 King James, 158 King William of Orange, 158 Kostick, Gavin, 127–129

L Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara, 18–20, 23 Layering, xvi, 96, 99, 143 Leslie, Gerard, 145 Lippard, Lucy, xiv, xv, 1–7, 9, 10, 13, 36, 37, 60, 81, 179, 184 Long, Declan, 2, 21–23 Loreto Grammar School, Omagh, 67, 76

M MAC Belfast, xxii, 154 Making Her Mark 2018, xvi, xxiii, 96, 97 Marriage, 26, 42, 43, 71 Masculinity, 154, 158 Matriarchal, 27, 94, 107 May, Teresa, 150 McAleese, Mary, 30 McKeown, Laurence, 127, 131, 132 McWilliams, Margaret, 6 #METOO, 15, 39, 165 Middlesex University, 80, 111 Monster/monstrous, 51, 153, 154, 160

Montague, Dominic, 133–135, 139 Morris, Locky, 6, 162 Mother, xiii, xix, 15, 26, 27, 31, 42, 66–68, 72, 74, 78, 84, 89, 94, 95, 107, 112, 125, 143, 147, 148, 161 Murphy, Peter, 136, 139 Mythological, 153, 154, 157, 169 N Napier, Phillip, 151, 162 Narrative, xvi, xx, 3, 15–20, 38, 41, 49, 50, 81, 83, 91, 98, 99, 120, 123–125, 127, 129, 130, 134, 152, 163, 167 National Collection, 91 Nationalism, 7, 9, 38, 64, 154, 169 No More 2013, 88 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), 8, 67, 69, 101 Northern Irish Arts Council, 3, 44 Nuptial Grooming , 43 O Oblique, xvii, 2, 6, 7, 9, 21, 81–83, 85, 95, 153, 165, 178 Offaly, 26, 27, 30 Omagh, 66, 70, 78 Orange Order, 158, 176 Ordinary Level Exams (O-Levels), 77, 108, 110 Outposts , 12, 19, 44, 131 P Paisley, Ian, 29, 39 Parades, xiv, 29, 160 Paramilitary, 5, 14, 50, 79, 108, 109, 120, 152, 154–156, 159, 181 Parian porcelain, 160, 162, 166 Partition (of Ireland), 22, 65, 70

INDEX

Peace, xiv, 2, 5, 7, 11, 67, 100, 110, 147, 150–152, 154, 155, 180, 182–184 Performance, xii, xxix, 3, 11, 17, 31, 46, 64, 96, 97, 106, 107, 110–113, 115, 119, 120, 123–130, 132, 135, 154, 157 Ph.D., xxviii, 150, 152 Place, xii–xiv, xvii, xx, 3, 8, 17, 27, 35, 37, 45, 57, 76, 81, 85, 90, 99, 109, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 147, 160, 162, 178 Politics, xiii, xiv, xxvii, xxx, 3, 4, 7–9, 12, 13, 29, 32, 37, 38, 42, 50, 56, 58, 81, 97, 98, 115, 124, 131, 152, 153, 165, 167, 179, 181 Porcelain, xiv, xvii, 145, 152, 154, 159–162, 167, 169 Portraiture, xx, 18 Post-conflict, xi, xv, 12, 13, 155, 160 Power and abuse of power, 154, 167 Putin, Vladamir, 21, 97

Q Quartered Belfast, A Love Story, xxiii, 133 Queen’s University Belfast, 119

R Reid, Christina, 116, 118 Republic of Ireland, 9, 44, 49, 70, 75, 131, 145 Rome, 161, 162. See also British School at Rome Royal Air Force (RAF), 26, 74 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 69, 70, 72, 73, 101, 108, 131 Rules, 14, 15, 17, 41, 70, 92, 113, 120, 142, 161, 164

195

S Sands, Bobby, 37 Satire, 12, 21, 33–35, 46, 56 Sculpture, xxix, 12, 20, 33, 56, 144, 145, 147, 154, 159–162, 164, 167, 170, 172 Seawright, Paul, 6, 13, 162 Sectarian/sectarianism, xii, xiv, 2, 3, 5, 8, 27, 29, 32, 35–37, 42–44, 99, 102, 111, 129, 151, 155, 165 Sectarian discrimination, 26 Segregation, xii, xxiii, 12, 19, 39, 41, 56 7:84 Theatre Co., 114 Shirt Factory, 45 Siege, xii Site-specific drama, xvi, xvii, 119, 126, 133 Slade School of Fine Art, 82, 85 Slip cast, 153 So It Is (The Mattress Factory Pittsburgh), 46, 61, 162, 166, 168, 176 SOURCE, 147, 175 South Africa, xxvii, 11, 46, 69, 180 Souvenir Shop, xvi, 46 Special Powers Act 1922, 49 Sport, xiii, 106, 107, 110, 151 St. Columb’s College, 60 St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls, xiv, 30, 110 Suicide, 113, 155 Super Mario, 154 Supremacy/supremacist, 29, 37, 52, 69, 158 Surreal, 153, 155, 156, 159–161, 167, 169 Synagogue for the Arts, Tribeca, NY, 127 Systemic, 11, 29, 32, 69, 93, 132, 164, 165, 167

196

INDEX

T Thatcher, Margaret, 32 Theatre, xvii, 67, 78, 110–112, 115, 116, 119, 123, 126, 131, 137 The Bonfires , 158–160 The Dock, 162 The Emperor Has No Clothes , 12, 19, 51, 56 The Graces (Charites), 157 The Hooded Men, 75 The Irish Question, 8 The Lyric Theatre Co., xvii, 118 The Mattress Factory, xxix, xxx The Precariat (RHA Gallery), xvii, 20, 162, 166, 167 The Royal Hibernian Academy Art Gallery, xxii, 162 The Three Gracies , 157 The Ulster Museum, xxii, 26, 44, 166–168 The Wapping Project London, xxii, xxiii, 64, 96 The Wounding , 12, 20, 164, 167, 168 The Writings of Thomas Carnduff , 115 This is What We Sang , xxiii, 20, 127, 128, 130 This Love Thing , 115 Tinderbox, xvi, 19, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 125 Tinderbox Theatre Co., xiv, 115, 118, 119, 126 Totnes, England, 112, 113, 116 Tradition, xvii, 43, 136, 154 Tricolour (flag), 159 Trump, Donald, 51, 52, 56, 97 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 11, 180 Two Roads West , 20, 127

U Ulster University, 31, 34, 35, 37, 58, 78–80, 134, 147, 150 Unionist, 7–9, 22, 60, 69, 70, 109, 127, 152, 158 Union Jack (flag), 159 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 81, 83, 85, 99 United Kingdom (UK), xxii, xxix, 3, 11, 45, 49, 67, 87, 93, 94, 112, 130, 131, 150, 165, 183 Utopia, 124

V Violence, xiii–xv, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 17, 22, 32, 42, 50, 51, 72, 90, 93, 99, 109, 112, 152, 155, 164, 165, 179, 180, 183 VISUAL (Carlow, Ireland), xxiii, 168 Vocation, 32, 67, 115, 117 Voice, xv, 16, 19, 21, 37, 39, 68, 74, 180

W Warhol, Andy, 35 Weaving, 147, 168 Westminster, 21, 70 Williams, Betty, 30 Wit, 34, 39, 46, 56 Wolverhampton Museum, xxii, 44 Women’s rights, xvii, 3 Wylie, Donovan, 6

Y YouTube, 164