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  • Cover Notes
  • Vera Kreilkamp

Front cover
Rita Duffy, Dolmen (1997), 5' x 5' oil and wax on linen.
Image appears courtesy of the artist.

Back cover
Rita Duffy, Gnéas (1996), 4' x 4' oil on linen.
Image appears courtesy of the artist.

The paintings reproduced on the front and back covers of this issue were displayed together in Banquet, a 1997–1998 gathering of drawings and paintings in a figurative/narrative tradition by Rita Duffy, a contemporary Belfast-based artist.1 (The exhibition was called Banquet after the title of a key painting depicting an unset modern dining room table and six unoccupied chairs positioned inside a stockade fortress; in that desolate prison setting a domestic banquet is evoked but never celebrated.) Although both cover images resist any single reading or narrative closure, they draw on themes of female confinement and absence present in other works in that exhibition.

Dolmen (front cover) suggests Rita Duffy's persistent negotiation with historical pressures shaping Irish women. Much of the artist's earlier work, such as the painting Dancer—which appeared on the [End Page 284] cover of Éire-Ireland almost ten years ago—found imaginative sources in a hoard of insistently autobiographical memories about sectarian and political pressures on children in the North.2 In Dancer, part of Duffy's 1995 Palimpsest Series, a prepubescent figure in a school uniform rigidly performs the motions of Irish step dancing, a sanctioned cultural activity for Catholic girls. She is surrounded by whirling helicopters in the shape of madonnas or nuns—figures evoking monitory nationalist/sectarian pressures on Northern Catholic children.

Since the mid-1990s Rita Duffy has continued to explore the interplay between gender and nationality in the North, turning to imagery concerned with issues of territoriality and the relationship between landscape and history. Duffy has increasingly emerged as a public figure in Northern Irish culture—as an artist who seeks to involve the community in her work. For the 2001 Belfast Festival, Duffy produced Drawing the Blinds, a temporary site-specific work in which she placed images of the residents of the Divis Flats within the windows of the complex and created what has been described as a "giant backlit tapestry." In 2003, the site-specific installation Contemplating an Iceberg drew on local memories of the Titanic, built in Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyards largely by Protestant workers. Duffy's iceberg paintings explore lost imperial certainties and the relationship between buried trauma and modern Irish identities in ominously beautiful images that, nevertheless, transcend the local. Painting on aluminum, she produced in 2004 a series of icy portrayals of the white marble statue of Queen Victoria presiding over Empire, which like Belfast's memorial to the Titanic, occupies City Hall grounds near her studio.3 The images featured on this issue's front and back covers mark Duffy's movement toward a more public imagery in her continuing exploration of women's roles. [End Page 285]

Front Cover: Dolmen

A dolmen is an iconic image associated with the Irish countryside, a group of megalithic standing stones, a marker of a nation's ancient culture. In the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century cultural revivals, such ruins scattered on the landscape—dolmens, ancient forts, passage graves, court cairns, and burial mounds housing excavated and unearthed treasures—were drawn into a colonized country's claim for cultural and political legitimacy. Increasingly, they have become, like ruined Norman towers, medieval churches, and Ascendancy Big Houses, iconic representations of Irishness in tourism campaigns.

Rita Duffy's Dolmen transforms landscape features of stone and grass into the uncanny floating attire of a beautiful woman, whose body is barely contained (or restrained) by circles of stone walls and beneath that, by a green burial mound that is itself contained by a lower circle of bordering gray. The breasts and shoulders of the woman in Dolmen rise from her expansive grey and green garment, as an image of aggressive desire and authority emerging from a stone-and-earth enclosure—but perhaps, as well, imprisoned by it. The woman alludes alternatively to an epic figure like Queen Maeve, Ireland's sexually voracious warrior queen, supposedly buried in a stone...

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