Willie Doherty is one of Ireland’s most successful living artists. His subtle photography and video works about paranoia, surveillance and trauma in Northern Ireland are hugely popular here and abroad. He has twice represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, and twice been nominated for the Turner prize. Yet his unrelenting portrayals of Northern Irish roads, fields and empty buildings have been criticised by those who believe that the Derry artist needs to leave the Troubles behind. They feel Doherty’s focus has yet to evolve.
If Lapse, his latest exhibition at Dublin’s Kerlin gallery, is anything to go by, he has paid little heed to such concerns. Defiantly, Doherty is not just addressing the Troubles again, but he is returning to photographs he took about them almost 30 years ago.
“They’re all new-old works,” he says, sitting in the Mac, a recently opened arts venue in Belfast. “They’re negatives that I made between 1985 and 1993. I didn’t show these works at the time; I kind of neglected them. It was a time when I was making the early body of work, the black-and-white photographs with text. I was focused on selecting images that had the potential to be used with text. I had set parameters about the kind of images that I thought were interesting or usable.”
Doherty got the idea for the show last year when he started to go through his archive of negatives following a request from a New York gallery to exhibit some of those popular early photographs with text. None of the images at the Kerlin has been printed before.
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He has meticulously photographed Derry for three decades, repeatedly returning to certain locations.
However, among these “new-old” images are places that Doherty recaptured with no memory of having photographed them in the 1980s and early 1990s. One of his most popular video installations is Ghost Story, which represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale five years ago, and which features figures standing under a flyover. In the Kerlin show, there is an image of the same flyover taken in 1985 with a near-identical title — Ghost Walk. Doherty had no memory of the earlier image when making the video installation.
Another photograph, taken in 1986, shows the road on which Ciarán Doherty would be murdered 24 years later by the Real IRA on suspicion of being a British informer. The artist realised only a few months ago that he had a negative of that very spot.
“I was trying to understand why I made certain decisions and why I neglected something,” he says of the drive behind Lapse. “They look more interesting to me as photographs now than obviously they did at the time. I selected a number of negatives and decided to have them printed, but what I didn’t want to do was treat them as though they had been made in 1985 or 1993. Obviously I’m looking at them now with the benefit of hindsight.”
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The exhibition has a strong sense of suffering familiar from Doherty’s other work. He reckons the “trepidation, fear or paranoia” that drew him to the unsettling flyover for Ghost Story was the same sensation that brought him there in 1985. Lapse, he acknowledges, will be framed by the post-peace process era but the effects of the Troubles linger in Northern Ireland.
“Our emotional and psychological response to a place is not something that stopped in 1998 with the ceasefire,” he says. “Many of the unresolved traumas that people have experienced, to some extent, still exist. They’re often embodied within places; people have had experiences associated with certain places or landscapes. Other people talk about driving through Northern Irish countryside and you come across a road sign that says the name of the town or the place and you’re immediately reminded of what happened there.”
Doherty was born into a Catholic, nationalist family and grew up on the edge of Derry’s Bogside, where riots and the release of tear gas were daily occurrences. He went to art college in Belfast as a way of getting out. He was friends with a local band as punk was taking off in the mid-1970s. They hung around with the Undertones and he found something more interesting in music than politics.
After college, he decided to re-engage with the place from where he came. If he was going to live in Derry, he would make work that addressed what was happening there. Part of his motivation was to counteract the media’s portrayal of Northern Ireland. “As a 12-year-old, the events of Bloody Sunday and the subsequent inquiry flew in the face of what I knew to be the truth. So it made me question the opinion I’d formed, that the media told the truth,” he says.
“My interest initially in photographs was because I felt frustrated. The most well-known images of Northern Ireland — and I’m thinking about the early 1970s, that kind of period — were made by visiting photojournalists, who in some ways framed what the conflict was. They’ve been paid to go there, spend two or three days looking for a particular kind of image.
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“There were certain things I would never include in images. I would never have photographs that clearly showed the presence of the army or the police; I wouldn’t show military vehicles or barbed wire.”
While he moved on from this early frustration, the media continued to influence his work. Doherty began using voiceovers when the broadcasting ban on republican and loyalist organisations was introduced. He made a video entitled The Only Good One Is a Dead One in response to public-service videos being transmitted by the Northern Ireland Office showing “what it looked like to be blown up, shot, killed. People were already frightened and paranoid about the possibility of being shot and then you’ve got the Northern Ireland Office creating these videos to show you what it looks like. How bizarre is that?”
Doherty didn’t set out to document, but the images in Lapse have acquired a documentary value with hindsight. What was once a road is now the spot where a man was executed. The exhibition suggests that places retain their trauma long after the victim has been removed and the perpetrator has left.
For much the same reason he was uncomfortable with foreign photojournalists creating the accepted image of Northern Ireland, Doherty is reluctant to work in another country. He recently moved to Donegal, but continues to work in Derry.
For all its roots in Northern Ireland, the more ambiguous sense of paranoia in Doherty’s work had found international resonance. Next month the artist will appear at the Documenta exhibition in Germany, and a survey show is planned for Colombia in 2013. He was invited to appear in several shows post-September 11 and the conflict in Iraq. His work has also met hostility from people who considered him a “republican apologist” or “anti-British”. In an extension of his political approach, he refuses to exhibit in places where he has objected to a government or administration. He is reluctant to say where these are, because he retains the right to change his mind.
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The status quo can change quickly, so Doherty is not interested in capturing economic trends or current affairs. He is looking for something more constant. “The current political shape here in the North, and it’s probably [true of] the whole of the island, is not settled. It could be different in 50 years’ time. You really have that sense of it still being worked out,” he says.
“To me that’s what makes it interesting to live and work here; that sense of things being not finished, unresolved. I don’t think in terms of projects. I’m in the middle of something called my life and I’m just doing stuff along the way.”
His work about the Northern Ireland of 30 years ago reflects concerns that still persist. We are generations away from eliminating the trauma of the Troubles. The peace process has scraped most of the violence from the surface, but Doherty’s work is caring for the scars.
Lapse is at the Kerlin gallery in Dublin. kerlin.ie