IRELAND

Cavan/Fermanagh Border-based artist opens major national solo show in Cork

Jessica Campbell
Fri, 23 June 2023 

Cavan/Fermanagh Border-based artist Rita Duffy, known for her acerbic political commentary, opens major national solo show in Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Rita Duffy believes in the power of art to help tackle the seemingly insurmountable global challenges of climate change, inequity and migration.

The veteran Northern Irish artist, who is based on the Fermanagh/Cavan Border, is well known for her acerbic political commentary in works such as ‘The Raft Project’ which replicated 19th century painting The Raft of the Medusa to critique Brexit politics. In this exhibition, she focuses her keen gaze on migration and climate change in a soon-to-be-revealed series of exciting new works that form the backbone of her first solo exhibition in the Crawford Art Gallery.

Rita Duffy. Photo: Johnny Banbury

Duffy’s new triptych of paintings, Epiphany, Belfast to Byzantium and Ornithopter, grapple with the grotesquery of a world of socio-economic divisions against the backdrop of climate change, migration and increasing attempts to use borders as a fortress to protect the affluent .

Referencing post-Trump US politics, the 2021 Kabul airlift and the history of Northern Irish people as settlers in the US Bible Belt, the trilogy is a painful satire of global affairs, painted with a nod to Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel and Goya.

Rita Duffy, Ornithopter, 2023. © the artist.

Duffy holds a horrifying mirror up to the current state of world affairs, and yet she believes not all is bleak: art and creative thinking are our hope for the future, she says.

“I think art is the thing that is the most hopeful,” Duffy says. “There is a sense of cataclysm all around us, in our movies, our culture. It’s almost like we’re digging ourselves into the negative darkness and that’s where art’s role becomes more and more important.”

An artist known for her Northern Irish roots and her pervasive interest in social justice, she says identifying herself as nationalist in the context of the climate crisis is problematic, even as a large political shift is underway in her native Northern Ireland.

Rita Duffy, Partition, 2023. © the artist.

“I think there’s a phenomenal, unstoppable energy bubbling up in Ireland. Now more than ever, local politics are important as they speak to the global. There is only one issue we need to be urgently addressing and that’s climate change,” she said.

“There’s nothing else on the agenda. We’re coming into a post-nationalist state, because it doesn’t matter what your nationality is or where you’re from. If you don’t have clean water to drink or a safe place to live, waving a flag is not going to make any difference to you.”

Mary McCarthy, Director of Crawford Art Gallery said: "Crawford Art Gallery continues to champion artists practice through these solo presentations as well as through group exhibitions. Duffy’s work is relevant pertinent and visually arresting. We hope our visitors will be inspired and engaged by her rich visual imagery."

Persistent Illusion by Rita Duffy is in the Gibson Galleries at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork City until Sunday, October 8.