Looking through cell doors

Belfast-born and Belfast resident, Rita Duffy has consistently situated her work in the broad social and political arena - in the often bitterly contested public spaces - of Northern Ireland, and she has done so in a generally accessible manner.

She established her reputation with meticulously crafted representational paintings that ambitiously addressed a personal and social fabric defined by segregation, animosity and violence. She has also been acutely aware of her position as a woman in this context and, increasingly, of how gender issues are both part of the overall picture and can cast a different light upon it.

In doing this she initially reached back to a pre-modernist style, to the heightened representation, dark, burnished tonality and rich glazes of Renaissance painting in Northern Europe, and in particular an art rooted in the secular, workaday world (with references to the related, hard-edged social commentary of German New Realist painting of the 1920s). The observation, once made about her work - that in doing so she also adopted the privileged position of omniscient narrator, rather than implicated observer - is reasonable up to a point, particularly given her generally critical stance in relation to extremist positions of whatever political hue. But, with the wisdom of hindsight, looking back over the progress of her output, it does seem that as an observer she has always been grounded in the horizon of her own personal and historical situation.

She has been so, admittedly, at first to a lesser, then a progressively greater extent. It is appropriate that she set out to describe a society effectively mired in its own history in pre-modernist terms, not least because Northern Ireland is culturally attuned to detail to an almost frightening degree, and her method of iconographic painting was all about the proliferation of relevant, symbolically charged detail. Identity, covert and proclaimed, is at the heart of this preoccupation, from conspicuous markers like flags, sashes and lilies to almost invisible ones.

She cites a community art project in 1990 as a seminal experience for her. Inspired by the end of the Berlin Wall, she organised children from both communities collaboratively to paint out sections of the wall defining the Peace Line separating the Shankill Road from the Falls Road. Most people, she found, wanted the wall to stay exactly where and as it was. "The problem is," she commented, "that the wall has been built into the system now . . . The division that it marks is being reinforced by it."

From the mid-1990s her work took a more explicitly autobiographical direction. Frieze and Awakening are schematic narrative accounts of dawning self-awareness. But as the girl at the centre of the work begins to develop a sense of her own potential, she also measures herself, her dreams and aspirations against the world around her, necessarily negotiating an environment charged with religious and cultural symbolism, an environment that places her and seeks to mould her whatever her personal wishes might be. To some extent this reflects female experience in any number of societies, but there are factors that, if by no means unique, are certainly specific to Northern Ireland.

Her exhibition, Banquet, took a longer, historical view of this outside but constantly intrusive world as embodied in the North. In the title painting, a domestic dining room is incongruously sited in the middle of a defensive stockade, an image that works on a number of levels - for example, as a symbolic account of the contrived normality of life within the ramparts of a state under siege.

HER latest project is an installation that introduces history in a direct, material way. It began when an architect, working on a feasibility study for the development of the disused women's prison in Armagh approached her for her opinion on what to do with a number of small, anomalous spaces in the building. Exploring the building, she was struck by the imposing presence of the cell doors, formidable, lead-skinned, each with its spyhole.

"I had," she says, "been working on ways of subverting objects, of making sculpture out of ordinary things in ways that redefined them, and as it happened I've been using lead in my paintings." She asked whether she could borrow six doors and permission was given. These form an armoured hexagonal in the gallery, a hidden space. But you can peer through the spyholes - and she notes, by an unforeseen chance, perhaps catch the eye of another observer at another spyhole, a somehow unnerving experience. Within, a floor of salt stands for "dried tears", and, in the red-pigmented interior of the space, runs a "river of glass tears".

Close to the entrance, a number of tiny paintings, called collectively Tall Water, are hung, one stacked above the other. They all feature fragmented images of a woman washing. "I wanted it to be about a quiet, internal grief," as Duffy sees it. "About something internalised rather than something on the outside. That has to do with the sense that the Peace Process depends on the fact that there was no victory for anyone. No one lost and no one won. That creates its own difficulties for people who have experienced loss. Why did someone they loved have to die? It's very difficult to get your head around something like that, and I think a lot of people have been damaged mentally by what happened who aren't even aware of it."

There is inevitably a contentious element in using cell doors. "I was quite apprehensive about the possible reactions, and I've actually had some strange reactions. One man came up to me and said that his sister had learned to crochet in Armagh prison. Just that, then he walked away. I thought people might say: `Oh, it's a piece about all the prisoners getting out and that's it'. But on the whole I find that people are astute enough not to read it on a singular level, to see that it refers to much more than that, to imprisonment and release and grief in a wider, metaphoric sense. I think that's a good sign, that there is a willingness to take on the complexity of the political situation, something that I don't think would have been possible even just five years ago. I couldn't have made a piece like this then." ET

Veil, an installation by Rita Duffy, is at The Summit at the Old Museum Arts Centre until Saturday, November 11th, 9.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.