Willie Doherty 19 November 2011 – 28 January 2012 Exhibition Guide
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Introduction To celebrate the purchase of Buried (2009), Wolverhampton Art Gallery have prepared an exhibition of work by internationally renowned Irish artist Willie Doherty. The show has been developed in partnership with Matt’s Gallery, London, and is Doherty’s first in Wolverhampton. The project links to the Gallery’s wider ambition to collect and exhibit contemporary art addressing themes of conflict and identity. The exhibition consists of two single-screen video installations –Ghost Story (2007) and Buried (2009) – and a body of photographs selected by the artist. The first part of the exhibition displays examples of Doherty’s early black and white photographs with text, including the rarely seen diptych Stone Upon Stone (1986). This is followed by colour photographs from the 1990s, which refer to the landscape of Northern Ireland and specific sites of conflict. The videos are projected within purpose-built darkened environments in the second gallery. Sound-proofing foam and carpet have been used by the artist to contain sound within each space. This achieves a more immersive and immediate experience for the viewer.
Border Crossing, 1997.
Willie Doherty Willie Doherty was born in 1959 and raised in Derry, Northern Ireland. Positioned at the border separating Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland, Derry is a place deeply bound up with the history of the Troubles conflict. Much of Doherty’s work has been shaped by his experience of living in a society deeply divided by political and religious conflict and of being forced to deal with feelings of oppression and fear. At the age of twelve Doherty witnessed Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972), one of the worst single incidents of The Troubles during which 13 civil rights protestors were shot dead by members of the British Army’s 1st Parachute Regiment. In the days that followed, he observed a mismatch between the media’s reporting of the incident and the events themselves. This convinced him of the unreliability of the photographic medium, leading him to explore the inconsistencies that occur in the representation of reality. Since he first began exhibiting in the early 1980s, Doherty has returned to the themes of place and memory, most notably in Ghost Story (2007). Doherty has twice been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, in 1994 and 2003, and has represented both Ireland and Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale, in 1993 and 2007. He also represented Great Britain at the São Paulo Biennale in 2002. A retrospective of the artist’s work was held at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in collaboration with Dublin Contemporary 2011.
Last Bastion (1992)
Early work Having briefly left to study sculpture in Belfast, Doherty returned to his native Derry in 1984 and began to make work inspired by images readily about the place. The black and white photographs he created in the late 1980s and early ‘90s feature text overlaid on images of Derry and the surrounding area. These early works came out a sense of frustration that the artist felt with the way in which the conflict in the North of Ireland was being represented by the outside world. Doherty wanted to create low-key images that avoided directly representing the more immediate signs of conflict in the landscape. His images of the walls of Derry or the banks of the River Foyle dealt instead with the everyday reality of living in Derry. The history of The Troubles is often described in terms of pairs or opposites (English and Irish, South and North, Catholic and Protestant, Green and Orange, Unionist and Republican). Doherty’s use of text in the early works allowed him to explore the language of political conflict and set such words and phrases in opposition to each other.
Stone Upon Stone (1986) Doherty’s use of the diptych format in Stone Upon Stone (1986) allows him to present two voices in one work. Seemingly identical views of the west and east shores of the River Foyle are positioned side by side in the gallery. Each photograph is almost, but not quite, a mirror image of the other. The west bank (Nationalist) is stony and barren compared to the east (Loyalist). The artist has inscribed the photographs with symbolic signs of Republicanism and Loyalism. TIOCFAIDH ÁR LÁ (our day will come), in green lettering, accompanies THE WEST BANK OF THE RIVER FOYLE, while THIS WE WILL MAINTAIN, in blue lettering accompanies THE EAST BANK OF THE RIVER FOYLE. Despite the similarity of their compositions, the two positions are separated, not just in terms of the use of language (Gaelic / English), but also through the cultural codification of the colours green and blue. These colours are synonymous with the opposing political positions of Irish Nationalism and Loyalism. By employing a comparative strategy, the artist brings each side’s use of language and landscape to light for scrutiny.
Colour photographs Doherty stopped making text based works in 1991 and started to produce large format colour photographs focusing on landscape, objects in the landscape, and the multiple possible meanings that could be drawn from them. Roads, roadblocks, checkpoints, borders, and abandoned cars evidence the presence of conflict in the landscape. In At the Border IV (1995) Doherty directly engages the viewer in a site of conflict, positioning us at the border dividing the north from the south of Ireland. In other works (Critical Distance, 1997), we see a surveillance view of the city as a constellation of streetlamps and lights from windows. The photographs are printed on high gloss cibachrome paper and mounted on aluminium. They are purposely hung low and unframed to bring viewers into a close relationship with the work, and to suggest that we experience the images as if we were visitors in Northern Ireland rather than visitors in a gallery. The artist has carefully selected photographs that respond to the video works in some way, either in relation to location or in terms of visual motifs in the work.
Video installations This exhibition presents two videos: Ghost Story (2007) and Buried (2009). Conceived as a companion piece to Ghost Story, Buried was filmed in the same location in Derry: on or near a disused railway line, now a footpath. Both videos deal with themes of place and memory; the path becomes a metaphor for retracing steps. In these two videos, as in reality, The Troubles are not solved; the trauma has not gone away. It lives on in the mind and memory. This idea is expressed differently in each film. In Ghost Story the narrator is haunted by events he has witnessed, while in Buried the ongoing presence of the past is suggested by traces of things buried in the landscape. Doherty does not approach his video installations with a preconceived idea of what the final work will look like. He begins by filming specific sequences. After a set of sequences has been finished the artist considers what to include or cut in a final sequence of sections. These are most often repeated as a single loop.
Ghost Story, 2007 15 minutes, colour, sound, single-screen installation
Ghost Story was commissioned for the Northern Ireland Pavillion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and first shown there alongside two of the artist’s earlier video installations, Closure (2005) and Passage (2006). In this exhibition, the work is shown with Buried, a work that Doherty developed as a partner piece in 2009. Ghost Story consists of a number of different scenes unified by the motif of a road by the side of a river. Sometimes we view the path through the trees and sometimes the camera leaves the path, to walk between a fenced wall and some garages or to lead us to someone waiting in the corner of an underpass. The road is the place however to which the viewer always returns. The scene reminds the narrator (Stephen Rea) of a ‘bright but cold January afternoon’. Walking along the deserted path he is haunted by ghosts in the trees, ‘shadow-like figures’ with a look of ‘terror and bewilderment’ in their eyes. The face might represent the face of history looking back or a character seeing the ghost.
Stills from Buried
Buried (2009) 8 minutes, colour, sound, single-screen installation
Buried (2009) was commissioned by and first shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Unlike Ghost Story, Buried has no voice-over. The sound playing over the imagery consists instead of archival recordings of crowd scenes from the early 1970s, combined with ambient sound recorded during filming. Doherty slows down and muffles the archival audio material, burying it into the background. The camera moves low to the ground throughout the video, searching for something hidden in a dark and menacing woodland clearing. The things that it brings into focus might be innocent –loops of wire, a latex glove, a shotgun cartridge, the remains of a fire, discarded clothing –but we are left fearing that something more sinister is at play. As the camera reveals traces of material evidence, we sense that the past is buried but ever present. At the end of the sequence, the camera returns once again to the same woodland, pointing to the persistence of memory and the ongoing trauma of the past. The notion that the past cannot be resolved is reinforced by the video’s looped format. As viewers, we become caught in a perpetual nightmare.
Collecting with the Imperial War Museum Buried is Wolverhampton’s first co-acquisition with another museum. An edition of the work was purchased jointly with the Imperial War Museum, London, in 2010, with support from the Art Fund. The piece can be exhibited at both institutions. Co-acquiring works of art allows organisations with similar collecting interests to pool resources to make significant purchases. This type of arrangement is particularly suited to the acquisition of film and video works, where the medium type means that the work can be more easily shared. The specific requirements that are often attached to showing film works also means that the expense of purchasing hardware for exhibition can be shared between organisations. In September 2011 Wolverhampton Art Gallery were awarded funding through the Art Fund RENEW scheme to build a new collection of contemporary art focused on the conflict in Israel/Palestine and its wider implications in the Middle East. This is a joint project with the Imperial War Museum that will allow both organisations to collect in a complimentary way. The new collection will provide an interesting comparison with the Troubles collections held at both institutions.
Background to the Northern Ireland collection Wolverhampton Art Gallery has a long tradition of collecting art tackling social and political themes, beginning with the Pop Art collection. In the 1980s the Gallery purchased a small number of works on the theme of The Troubles, a conflict which began in the late 1960s when Northern Ireland’s divided political life spilled out onto the streets in the form of civil rights marches. In 1993 the Gallery were given the opportunity to develop a distinct collection of artworks on this theme through the Contemporary Art Society’s Special Collection scheme. One the first purchases through this scheme was Border Incident (1994) by Willie Doherty. The Gallery’s decision to collect on the theme of The Troubles coincided with the IRA and Loyalist paramilitary ceasefire declarations of August and September 1994. In response to this milestone event the Gallery mounted a large-scale exhibition that sought to reflect upon how the subject had been addressed in the visual arts. Since the mid-1990s the Gallery have continued to build the Northern Ireland collection with assistance from CAS, the Art Fund, and the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Collecting Cultures scheme. It contains work in a variety of mediums and is internationally recognised as the only UK regional collection of its kind.
GHOST STORY I found myself walking along a deserted path. Through the trees on one side I could faintly make out a river in the distance. On the other side I could hear the faint rumble of far away traffic. The scene was unfamiliar to me. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the trees behind me were filled with shadow-like figures. Looks of terror and bewilderment filled their eyes and they silently screamed, as if already aware of their fate. The scene reminded me of the faces in a running crowd that I had once seen on a bright but cold January afternoon. Men and women slipped on icy puddles as they ran for safety. A few, in their panic, ran towards a wire fence, further trapping themselves. As they scaled the fence a military vehicle drove through it tossing them into the frosty air. Troops spewed from the back of the vehicle as it screeched to a sudden halt. They raised their rifles and fired indiscriminately into the fleeing crowd. The next day I walked over the waste ground that was now marked by deep tyre tracks and footprints, fixed in low relief and highlighted by a sharp hoar frost. I could find no other traces of the crowd. I returned many times to the same site until another fence was erected and a new building was put in place of the empty, silent reminder. I wondered about what had happened to the pain and terror that had taken place there. Had it been absorbed or filtered into the ground or was it possible for others to sense it as I did? The narrow streets and alleyways that I walked along became places where this invisible matter could no longer be contained. It seeped out through every crack and fissure in the worn pavements and crumbling walls. Its substance became visible to me in the mossy, damp corners that never seemed to dry out in winter or summer. A viscous secretion oozed from the hidden depths.
The smell of ancient mould mingled with the creeping odour of dead flesh. The ground was often slippery under foot as if the surface of the road was no longer thick enough to conceal the contents of the tomb that lay beneath the whole city. Some people claim that they are a malevolent presence while others believe that they offer guidance and advice to their family and friends. Not everyone can see them. They inhabit a world somewhere between here and the next. They move between the trees. Caressing every branch. Breathing, day and night, on every flickering leaf. They are restless creatures whose intentions are often beyond our comprehension. His body was discovered on an overcast Sunday morning. I recognised him from the small black and white newspaper photograph that had accompanied the story of his murder. He smiled reluctantly, self-conscious and timid when confronted by the lens. As a boy, I stared at this photograph looking for a sign; unable to accept that the face was that of someone already dead. I retraced my footsteps along paths and streets that I thought I had forgotten. I walked past the place that I used to avoid and quickened my pace. He was waiting for me, as I always feared he would, emerging from a scorched corner where broken glass sparkled on the blackened ground. My train of thought was interrupted by a further incursion of unreality. My eyes deceived me as I thought I saw a human figure. No matter how quickly or slowly I walked the figure did not seem to get any closer. When I took my eye off the figure it disappeared. When I stared at the point where the path vanished the figure emerged once again from the trees or from the path itself. I could not tell.
I remembered shapes and colours from a flickering television screen. The outline of a car silhouetted against a grey sky. One door wide open and the car skewed awkwardly into a shallow ditch. A detail of the interior, grey checked fabric, an oily stain, a cassette player. The number plate, three letters and four numbers. The car had been abandoned and was partly burnt after a failed attempt to eliminate any forensic secrets that it might yield. At first, I didn’t see or hear the car. It seemed to appear from nowhere. In the evening twilight it was difficult to make out who was driving. The car slowed down and waited for me to approach. I became lost in memories of the minute details of photographs of people and places that I did not know. Men being taken away blindfolded. Their hands tightly bound by plastic cable ties. Barking dogs. Cages. Bodies in a pile. Guards standing over them smiling for the camera. Stains on a white floor. A car blown apart in a surgical strike. A shoe and a newspaper lying on the dusty road. A dazed family huddled in a bright sunlit street. Their clothes and faces splattered with blood that seemed to match the mosaic pattern on the wall behind them. The daylight wraith takes on the likeness of a living person. The wraith is usually a vision of someone who is in another place at the time of the appearance. It manifests itself during the hours of daylight in a place where the living person could not possibly be. A wraith can assume the likeness of a close friend or relative or even appear as the viewer’s own image. The appearance of a friend or relative usually means that the person is already dead or in great danger. To see one’s own image is a warning of one’s death within a year.
This guide is available to view at www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk Ghost Story text reproduced courtesy of the artist. Images courtesy of Matt’s Gallery, London and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Text by Zoë Lippett Design by Victoria Bithell