Even the proposal of this project was controversial, perhaps resurfacing ghosts that many in the community would rather not have remembered. The mooring of the iceberg and allowing it to thaw was conceived in order to encourage the melting of the frozen political differences, and Duffy stated that a large mountain of ice was the easiest way to represent where the people and government stood according to her, it was necessary to stop the denial so prevalent in Northern Irish culture and a need to accept what sank them in the first place. She held an artist residency at Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute where she worked on her project The Raft Project (2019), a reaction to Brexit and the border-poll discussion, inspired by Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), as well as the project Anatomy of Hope (2021) which looked at the Covid-19 pandemic.ĭuffy first came to prominent public attention in 2005 when she proposed to tow an iceberg from Greenland to Belfast in order to draw attention to the city's links to the Titanic this was also in an attempt to highlight the frosty impasse of Northern Irish Politics. In 2017, Duffy was recognised for her contribution to visual arts in Ireland and elected to Aosdana, Ireland's elected ‘people of the arts’. Her art is also held in many public collections such as the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, The Drawing Museum in New York and the Office of Public Works in Dublin. Three drawings produced in the 1980s (one of a soldier, one of a ‘kneecapping’ she witnessed on the Falls Road and one of a woman banging bin lids together) were purchased in the mid-2010s by the Imperial War Museum in London. Her work features in several major Irish institution's collections such as the Hugh Lane Gallery - which possesses her Sofa (1996), blood red and covered in sharp pins - and the Irish Museum of Modern Art which owns one of her Watchtower paintings which depicts observation sangars of the British Army. In 2005, Rita Duffy was named “Ulster's foremost artist”. The artist describes herself as “a republican in the truest sense of the word”, a pacifist and feminist. She has intentionally crept to the creative margins of Ulster where she can keep a “gimlet eye on the South” and intentionally away from Belfast's creative scene - yet another place she believed to never have belonged. Duffy now lives in Fermanagh with her family and works from her studio located in Ballyconnell, County Cavan, just south of the border. ![]() Duffy’s style is influenced by those of surrealism and magical realism (a style that depicts fantastical events in an otherwise realistic tone). ![]() ![]() ![]() Her work is generally seen to be autobiographical and deals with Irish identity, history and politics, often exploring these themes through irony, wit and humour. When at college, the artist preferred to engage in socially engaged figurative painting, and during her summers she spent time in New York City drawing street portraits, her style developing into what the country knows and loves today. from the Art and Design Centre, followed by an M.A in Fine Art from the University of Ulster. Rita Duffy, 2021, Portrait of an Artist, BBC OneĪs an adult, Duffy received a B.A.
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