Troubles portraits that capture the pain of those left behind

When you walk into this room full of faces, the first thing you notice are the eyes. Most traditional portraits give the illusion of direct eye contact; the subject stares out confidently from the canvas, presenting directly to the viewer. Not here. In Colin Davidson’s powerful exhibition of large-scale head portraits, representing 18 people who suffered during the Troubles, the eyes are averted, or cast down, or gazing into space. These people appear to be lost in thought or dreams or memory. The effect is intimate and disturbing. To an almost uncanny extent, you feel as though you are trespassing on private grief.

It's not a coincidence. Davidson's intention, right from the start of the five-year process that has culminated in this solo exhibition, Silent Testimony, at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, was to show the deep personal pain that unites his subjects.

“These paintings differ from classical portraits, where you are encouraged to form a relationship with the sitter,” he says. “As a viewer you are intruding; it’s almost as if you are not here.”

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Detail from Colin Davidson’s painting of Paul Reilly

Davidson believes that the presence of a witness, the person actually encountering the portrait, is vital. “This is just canvas with paint on it. It needs the engagement of the viewer. You might see grief or bereavement or age or bitterness, but I don’t build that in. I leave room in the work for something else to happen.”

Another unusual aspect of the exhibition that quickly becomes apparent is the absence of politics, or religion, or indeed any of the usual markers of identity associated with the Troubles. Beside each canvas is a caption, written by Davidson, and agreed by each sitter, which tells their personal story in a few brief, evocative words. We are told what happened to them, but not who did it or why.

We learn, for instance, that Maureen Reid’s husband and the father of her 10 children, James, was killed on January 17th, 1976, when a bomb was thrown into the Sheridan Bar in Belfast. Reid did not remarry and she raised her family on a widow’s pension.

Mo Norton lost her 24-year-old brother, Terence Griffin, on February 4th, 1974, when a bomb exploded on a coach on the M62 in England. Norton recalls the family realising that Griffin had been caught in the bomb when they saw one of his record sleeves by the road on a lunchtime television report.

Walter Simons’s son, Eugene, disappeared on January 1st, 1981. He had recently remarried following the death of his first wife, and was due to become a father again. Eugene’s body was discovered in 1984, in a bog in Co Louth; his remains were identified by the rose-gold Celtic cross around his neck, which had belonged to his first wife.

This careful omission of identity – both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ – was also part of Davidson’s plan. “When I was painting Seamus Heaney, Kenneth Branagh, people like that, I was trying to show their common humanity, looking at the greats as equal, fellow humans. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with this show too. With Heaney I didn’t see a poet, I saw a man. Here you are seeing your fellow men and women. It’s about human loss. The last thing I wanted was Protestant loss, or Catholic loss.”

Removing labels

Yet while it may not be immediately visible, the choice of sitters is finely calculated and balanced. Davidson worked closely with the Wave Trauma Centre, and Sandra Peake, the centre’s director, says that the 18 people chosen are as representative as it is possible to be. There are men and women; Protestants and Catholics; people who have lost children, or partners, or parents; victims from different periods of the Troubles, and from different geographical locations; people bereaved through republican, loyalist or state violence.

“We are a society driven by labels, and here we wanted to remove them,” says Peake.

“The rigour is there. It’s just not shown,” says Davidson. “We didn’t want people to say, ‘Oh, there’s a Roman Catholic’, or a Protestant, and feel less empathy as a result. There’s an element of frustration involved that’s part and parcel of where we live, the need for a badge.”

One of the strengths of the exhibition is how it deliberately withholds these marks of identity, while implicitly exposing our expectation or need for them.

Following the success of the recent exhibition Art of the Troubles at the Ulster Museum, which brought in 65,000 visitors, the museum's head of art, Kim Mawhinney, knew that there would be keen interest in Davidson's portraits. "People find that art can lead to conversations that might be difficult in normal circumstances," she says.

Underpinning it all is Davidson’s fierce compassion for people wounded in the conflict. “I remember reading the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and asking, ‘What’s in it for people who suffered loss?’ That question kept on nagging at me in the years afterwards. I realised that a massive section of the community was paying the price for everyone’s peace. There was this rhetoric of the need to move on, but there were tens of thousands of people who could not move on.”

Trust and vulnerability

In coming close to victims, asking them to become open and vulnerable with him, and to allow him to show their grief to the world, Davidson knew he was taking on an enormous responsibility. It was a delicate, difficult job. “‘Harrowing’ is the word I would use,” he says. “But the trust was there, because of the advocacy of Wave. The first time I met each person was when the sitting took place. For me, that was critical; I wanted the experience to be raw.”

Alan McBride, who lost his wife, Sharon, in the 1993 Shankill bomb, was part of the Wave team that sourced and supported the sitters. For him, the impact of the portraits was profound. “I found it emotional. The shared sense of pain and humanity. That’s what jumped out at you, when you saw the images together in one space. It was incredibly moving and powerful.”

But what of the subjects themselves? What did they make of the experience? Davidson has a strange request. He doesn’t want me to talk to them. “I was always aware this question would be asked. These individuals trusted me with their stories. Talking to the sitters puts all the labels and badges back on again. It misses the point. If you talk to them, it means disassembling what is intended to be a single work of art with 18 components. These people are equals, and I have a respect for them and a responsibility to them.”

So I don't seek out the sitters, because seeking them out would mean identifying them politically and religiously, the very thing Silent Testimony hopes to avoid. Besides, it isn't necessary. Everything you need to know is written on their faces.

• Silent Testimony runs at the Ulster Museum until January 17th, 2016. nmni.com