Buried (c) Willie Doherty
Willie Doherty (b.1959) is internationally celebrated for his work which includes photographs, video and film installations which are rooted in the political landscape of his native Derry.
Whilst situated in the context of Northern Ireland’s contested political and geographical history, the themes and imagery running through his work have universal significance and appeal.
This exhibition, originated by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, touring to Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, brings together a selection of Willie Doherty’s films and photographs, including a new film entitled, Buried, which was commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery with support from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
Buried was made and will be shown in the context of an earlier film, Ghost Story (TATE Purchase: 2009), which was first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Both works deal with memory, its repression and return, but while Ghost Story is narrated by a male voice piecing together a story of remembered horror, Buried relies on ambient sound to animate its dark, almost gothic, woodland imagery. The films influence each other, the recounted memories, dreams and premonitions of Ghost Story seeping into Buried. These films are complemented by a selection of photographs made throughout Doherty’s career.
Since the early 1980s, Doherty has explored problems of representation and perception. His films and photographs of particular places are often eerily uninhabited, but occasionally surprise the viewer with a burst of human activity. They address issues of territoriality and surveillance, and elicit fears of the unknown, of isolation or entrapment, building an atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion. Doherty’s focus on place, on the landscape which can no longer contain its histories and memories, avoids simple resolutions, acknowledging instead that long histories never die. In Doherty’s work, the past is buried but ever present. Doherty’s work blends fact and fiction, history and memory, and has an odd sense of timeless urgency – that these are concerns affecting us all, issues that will not go away.
Traces of human activity and memories of traumatic events haunt Doherty’s work. Doherty returns to the same locations, structures and subjects: sites in Derry and Belfast, roads and alleyways, waste ground, detritus, ruins of actions. In Doherty’s video installations, searching shots of vacant sites, together with the blurring of real, imagined and remembered events, encourage closer looking. Doherty presents his videos as installations, in soundproofed spaces that immerse the viewer in the work. He uses techniques and elements from mainstream and documentary film-making to produce an experience that seems simultaneously real and fictional.
A new publication featuring film stills from Ghost Story and Buried, with a short introduction by Fiona Bradley and new text by Willie Doherty, accompanies the exhibition and is available from the bookshop.
Willie Doherty: Buried can be seen from 19 December 2009 – 14 February 2010 at Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea.
Organised by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Glynn Vivian Gallery is supported by Arts Council of Wales.
