Cloth

Rita Duffy

Laundry Day in Derry (2013)

‘Ah - one more clean shirt will do me!’ Was the exclamation my father would make as he play acted
the weary martyr. Laundry day in William Street was a tribute to the Derry women who made shirts
and all women who have ever washed one. Hundreds of shirts festooned across William Street
announced better times and a clean start. William Street was the location of the famous photograph
of the dying Jackie Duddy and Fr. Daly waving a bloodstained hankie.

The installation was a wishful washing away of past traumas, a visual gesture that played into the
memory of huge crowds of Civil Rights protesters marching in the streets, demanding their human
rights. Laundry Day for Derry had a celebratory feel, a rebirthing of sorts. This collective of shirts
caught the breeze and made men and women look up to the sky, recognizing at some deeper
intuitive level perhaps that essential human gesture, to begin our lives again each day. Wondering
at the same time if it would stay dry until they got home and brought their own loved one’s garments
in from the line.

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Laundry (2009)

Beijing Contemporary Art Collection.

Laundry is a huge charcoal drawing on paper. It depicts the breeze of history blowing through
alleyways of washed linen. A public place of shared stains and familiar trauma, women peg and carry
cloth in a shadowy composition. A skirt resembles the pattern of a hand grenade, traitorous heads
are lopped in a basket, centuries of dateless violence, intrigue and betrayals, echo Ireland’s
tumultuous history. The central figure has a sweeping romantic hair-do, a version of my mother’s
glorious ‘French pleat’. Her red hair, combed, pinned and sprayed in place often reminded me of
the form of a harp. She stands defiant and careful as she hoists the washing line energetically up in
the air as a petard. Defiant and never to be bested, always the resilience is found to fight on. The
drawing was made during a residency at Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale (NKD) in Norway, the little
birds that frequented the forest beside the studio flew into the drawing, fluttering, whispering,
delivering essential messages.

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Connolly’s Shirt (2015)

Private Collection London

James Connolly's shirt has floated in my mind for a while. I tried my very best to wrestle the shirt
out of the careful hands of the National Museum in 2013, fully intending to bring it up the road to
the Shirt Factory project in Derry. I planned to situate it as a centre piece and expand discussions on
Irish socialism, alas for various reasons it was to remain imprisoned in Dublin.

I returned to the garment many times, experiencing the strange visual power resonant in
clothing of this nature i.e. Agnes Richter's jacket and the Archduke Ferdinand's shirt. Connolly's
fading bloodstain, a bullet injury caught in the 1916 Revolution for Irish independence. The rough,
fading cotton, and banal striped everydayness of Connolly's shirt drew me in. The resulting painting
became a treaty between my thoughts on the great political ideals and the individual lived reality.
The shirt hovers wraith-like above a ghostly housing estate and obsession for property ownership
and all that was the ‘boom’ of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger. Recent dreams of extreme prosperity continue
to haunt. The profound concepts of socialism and equality that Connolly fought and died for 100
years ago, appear more urgent now in the reckless chaos of our planet.
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Hankie 2006

Private Collection Dublin.

The oil on linen painting was made as a response to the conflict and trauma that was happening
around me in Belfast. I was twelve years of age when I began to watch the city that I had grown up
in, explode, a constant slow-drip, fear-filled sectarian battle for over 30 years. The white hankie is a
powerful international symbol, that forms a visual plea for clemency and safe passage, as in the
infamous image of Bloody Sunday in Derry, when Fr. Daly waved his blood stained white
handkerchief, beseeching British soldiers who had just shot and killed 13 people at a Civil Rights
march*. The Sunday evening news, played on our black and white television that evening, remained
with me for a long time. A small triangle of white cloth waved in the air, huddled men carrying a
dying 17-year-old Jackie Duddy down William Street. The painting depicts a hankie fallen in murky
darkness, discarded on a public pavement, frozen tears to echo the form of an iceberg. A numb
frozen trauma, that cast its shadow and passed through generations.

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Crossroads Dancing (2015)

Pym’s Collection London.

Crossroads Dancing is a large oil painting on linen 4 x 6ft. Four central figures are dancing a four-
hand reel, a common set dance in Irish traditional dancing. My mother is the central figure, born in
the midlands of Ireland in 1921, the same year as the country was partitioned. She dances barefoot
with Padraig Pearce, the republican hero, who was reputedly ‘uncomfortable’ with women.
Heedlessly, she holds his hand and connects to all things green, repressive and rural, such was her
experience of living in a small town post-independence Eire. De Valera was in power and his right-
wing governance was firmly judged and influenced by the Catholic Church. His vision of Ireland was
plain, ‘comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’; the reality was buses, boats and planes to take
them anywhere they could secure work. My father is to her left, not quite connecting to her alter
ego in the back ground, he dances her north to Belfast, the weaving factories and all that was orange
rusting and industrial.

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The Souvenir Shop (2016)

The Souvenir Shop was commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland as one of the national projects
in celebration of the 1916 Centenary events. The idea was inspired by Thomas Clarke's news agent’s
shop in Dublin; he was one of the rebels and was offering more than cigarettes and newspapers
from his shop in 1916. I wanted to explore the rebellion at home and the war in France during 1916
- that significant year in which my grandfather and many other Irishmen died in British army
uniforms. Nurse Elizabeth Farrell who fought in the GPO and afterwards negotiated the ceasefire,
disappeared from history: she was airbrushed out of the photograph in the National Museum
collection. Nurses became an important feature throughout the Souvenir Project, a figure of sanity
amongst the carnage. I designed and commissioned women to knit nurses and created ‘The Suture
and Save Sewing Kit’ paying tribute to all those women. Padraig Pearce’s empty coat and hat
became the project logo, haunting every product.

The small woolen dolls that are found secreted around the Souvenir Shop playfully act out
serious and bloody scenes. The Pieta, translated into wool by an avid Dublin knitter called Maura,
contextualizes a postcard depicting the ‘Injured Poacher’, a painting at the National Gallery of
Ireland with political resonance. A World War One soldier lies injured, watched over by two robust
knitted nurses, glad to get out of the social constraints that would never hold them back again. This
war was a mechanized slaughter. Such was the level of carnage they ran out of bandages. They
resorted to using sphagnum mosses collected and sent from Ireland to the battlefields of France
and Belgium.

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Relic (2002)

AIB Bank Collection, Dublin.

Relic, oil on linen 4 x 6ft, is an early painting

that evidences my preoccupation with
textiles, those garments that resonated
with a sense of ‘otherness’ became
inspiration for paintings. This parka jacket
belonged to Mairead Farrell, one of three
IRA volunteers shot dead in Gibraltar. I
came across the jacket at Conway Mill,
Belfast, in an improvised women’s museum
dedicated to IRA women, who were
incarcerated in Armagh Women’s prison.
The garment was hung relic fashion, on the
wall in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, a small tag
stating: “this was the jacket that Mairead
Farrell wore during her time in Armagh
Prison”. I was intrigued and managed to
finally make this painting, a haunted coat
that reaches out to the viewer. The painting
was defaced during a break-in at the studio.
In certain light the letters UVF can still be
read in the under painting, it is unlikely the
vandal knew the origins of the garment. It
is now in the Allied Irish Bank collection
Dublin and it is unlikely that they are aware
of the origins of the garment either.

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Civil Rights and Dream Pillows (2017)

The Civil Rights cushions were first made at the Shirt Factory Derry Project in 2013. The Shirt Factory
contemporary art project employed six women to sew just as their mothers, grandmothers and
great-grandmothers had done before. The Civil Rights cushions became a central product,
announcing the first Civil Rights march on the streets of Derry in 1969. The city of Derry was founded
on the sewing skills of generations of women and was mentioned by Karl Marx as the first example
of mechanized factory work. The Civil Rights cushion is constructed from a repurposed man’s shirt,
blue-striped and buttoned. In 1969 it was necessary for people to leave the comfort of a familiar
sofa, to go out and march for equality. The ‘I Have a Dream’ pillow was inspired by Martin L. King,
just as the African-American Civil Rights movement inspired the Civil Rights in Northern Ireland: they
are sister pieces and stood side by side at the Souvenir Shop project at the Mattress Factory
Museum in Pittsburgh USA 2017.

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You do good voodoo (2017)

The Souvenir Shop installation at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh invited me to exhibit
work with American concerns. I brought the Souvenir Shop methodology to bear on my current
understanding of life in the USA. I worked in residence in Pittsburgh Penn, an area that is considered
Trump territory. Together with the assistance of Anna Lena Kempen and Mattie Cannon we created
an entire shop installation with coal drawings, standing water bottles, re-invented weaponry,
crockery and many more items. The ‘You do good voodoo dolls’ were individual artworks, made
from cloth scraps and a few recycled wigs, aiming to engage ‘positive energy’ for a change in the
political trajectory USA has embarked on. People engaged with the project, buying the dolls and
placing their pins in the hope that they + art could influence POTUS to make better decisions. After
the first attempt to unravel Obama’s health care bill failed, I was reassured that ‘art is a collective
spiritual force’ to be reckoned with.

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Soften the Border Project (2017)

Under the title “Dwelling on the Irish Border” I recently wrote a piece for The Guardian (date of
publication?) I let my thought roam over the border between North and South of this island and, as
so often, did so in terms of textile.

Ulster has always been a difficult place - the warp and weft pulled this way and that, Irish,
Ulster Scots, and coloniser doing the tablecloth trick, sustaining the local row. Vast lengths of linen
bleaching on contested green fields attracted the Wright Brothers, aircraft builders with a universal
dream, to travel boundlessly through the sky. Those early planes were fragile as lollypop sticks and
cloth, doped together, lifted us up and provided my father with a job. In the past people have been
able to escape from dense labyrinths by threads given them by women. Ariadne is but one example,
but Ulster has many more. It were the women of Derry whose work in the factories gave the city its
economic strength and power; like their mothers and grandmothers, they made the shirts which
protected the men from the inhospitable weather; they sewed and knitted, cared and cured, they
kept the men warm and sane. Only, some of them abused this common work and were bent on
division. This results in curious phenomena in the landscape: the castle at Crom still flies the union
flag, standing on the edge of empire, a planter castle moored to a watery border, yet the ring of tall
trees still marks the burial ground of the Maguires, former chieftains of Fermanagh, who used to
own the estate. The Irish border was a British solution to a problem in 1921. A line drawn on a map
over hills and sudden dips, following small rivers and across family land. The resulting pattern
dropped from the sky, descending like strange dew onto local pasture, small farms and people’s
lives, on all our skin. The soil itself is, by nature, permeable: local farmers and lazy heifers wander
the damp land, shin deep in clabber. The shucks and ditches soggy with rainfall and seepage from
lakes unite to defy anyone a firm footing.

The Troubles brought a heavy security presence to border roads, movements were closely
monitored, unapproved roads were cratered and blockaded. British army surveillance towers
monitored conversations, lenses trained into living rooms and read newspapers over shoulders.
High above the main Belfast to Dublin road stood a fortified billet box, Faughart watch tower or Golf
2 in army speak. Small reassurance for a young Birmingham squaddy who, like Cuchulainn, guarded
the ancient passageway into Ulster. His weapon trembling in his hands as he walked the ditches of
Black Pigs Dike on foot patrol.

Thankfully the landscape of defence has disappeared and for the past twenty years people
of Northern Ireland have moved around growing more at ease and willing to accommodate
difference. A Polish electrician and Bulgarian photographer have walked into my life and
southerners in droves come north to shop. People from South and North eat Swedish meatballs
together at Ikea. I witnessed clear human evidence that given the opportunities to mix we can out
grow our “narcissism of small difference” as Sigmund Freud suggested.

But the concern about Brexit and hard borders have reignited old fears. Recently, as the worries
grew, I started an art project called ‘Soften the Border’ with women’s groups north and south,
located on the bridge between Blacklion and Belcoo. The boundary between Counties Cavan (in the
Republic) and Fermanagh (in Northern Ireland) is fluid, it floats in the river that flows beneath the
bridge. The villagers on either side cross the bridge to go to the butchers in the Republic and back

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over to the petrol station in the North. While people feel at home on either side, commerce enables
them to interact constantly across the bridge.

Working in conjunction with the Cavan Arts office and the Centre for Conflict Research in
Belfast ‘Soften the Border ‘aimed to give voice to the local experience. We worked to cover the
bridge in textiles and encouraged women to come together in a day of festivities. Irish traveller
women made cloth dolls to hang in the sky, symbolic of refugees across Europe. A local group of
border knitters gathered to crochet and create. We stitched, drank tea and chatted our way through
all the old garments I could find. Taking a feminist approach to a man-made line on a map, we
fashioned a big soft place at the centre of the bridge, challenging the hard concrete of past bigotries
and current Westminster thinking. Great big orbs of colour made from T-shirts and recycled jumpers
stitched together, dolls sky danced from one side to the other in every colour and shape imaginable.
The bridge was a place of celebration and bright punches of colour that was not missed on the
passing traffic. If pressing the car horn was a vote of support I consider a hard Brexit will fail in this
area.

This art project envisaged an open road in our collective future, devoid of spiked chains from
the past lurking in the ditch. And what I encountered in doing this project was an openness and
willingness to assist on both sides. After long years on a war footing of fear and division, people are
in a better place; human interaction has grown and developed. It is important our future does not
become our past.

Art has an important part to play in any society and a vital one in post conflict society the
first step is imagining. In this time of increasing chaos and climate change across the globe, to rethink
how we humans live and share this planet.
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