The Irish artist, Willie Doherty, has been shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize, the most prestigious award in the visual arts in Britain.
He was shortlisted once before, in 1994, and this second nomination is an acknowledgment of the continuing relevance and development of his work, which has its genesis in his experience of growing up in a divided community during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
He was nominated for "False Memory", a retrospective exhibition featuring about 40 works by him, held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from October 2002 to March this year.
He was born in Derry in 1959 and recalls witnessing the unfolding events of Bloody Sunday from his bedroom window.
He has returned to those events several times in his work. But rather than arguing from one partisan point of view or another he has consistently explored the problems inherent in representation and the fallibility of memory.
In his photographic, video and film installations, meaning is never fixed and neutral; it is culturally and ideologically constructed and projected on to the landscape, its inhabitants, events and even memories.
Stone Upon Stone from 1986, for example, sees two communities enshrine opposing aspirations on the two banks of the Foyle river.
In his richly atmospheric, multi-screen installation, How It Was, from 1998, several characters try vainly to reconstruct an accurate account of some past event.
The protagonist in his most recent video, Re-Run, 2002, is seen running towards both ends of the bridge over the Foyle simultaneously. Particularly in his photographic work, Doherty has become a poetic chronicler of the jagged beauty of the landscape of Derry and its hinterland as marked by years of conflict.
Apart from him, the shortlist includes the brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman and Grayson Perry. The remaining shortlisted artist, Anya Gallaccio, was an exhibitor in the original "Freeze" exhibition in 1988 that launched the career of Damien Hirst.
Work by all of the artists will be exhibited at Tate Britain from October through to January 2004.
