PRESS RELEASE by the Custom House Studios and Gallery, Westport, Ireland

‘This body of work is a conversation on the societal challenges of retaining one’s tradition, identity, and ancestral roots in the face of adversity, colonialism, nature, A.I. and capitalism. The concept of taking sides is considered whileexploring abstraction through transitions of games’ - Bryan Gerard Duffy

Custom House Studios + Gallery is delighted to present a substantial new body of work and solo exhibition by Mayo artist, Bryan Gerard Duffy. the idle wall takes its title from the wall to the fore of the gallery, where seafaring workers would historically have ‘idled’, awaiting the promise of work on the boats in Westport Quay. This vital and topical work is largely comprised of four moveable walls and a moveable wooden ‘well’. The fixtures, which can be wheeled and moved within the space by the audience, are composed of a wooden frame and are un-rendered, making them see-through.

These ‘Sailí’* walls, as the artist calls them, house and are adorned with paintings; found objects; small sculptures; cultural motifs, symbols and references; drawings; and a series of letters penned between the artist and a fictional, symbolic character from the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in Algeria, on the edge of occupied Western Sahara. The artist’s penpal waits with her people by a dividing wall, as they have done for nearly five decades, for a UN resolution enacting their right to return to their lands, from which they were forcibly displaced and where capitalist ventures continually exploit valuable natural resources.

These letter exchanges facilitate a narrative that weaves connections for the viewer between the plethora of artworks and objects visible in the walls: a navigational kind of tool for the audience. Integral to the work, chess games played by the artist at the Sahrawi refugee camp are represented in code form throughout, and in his paintings which depict horticultural elements in grid like formations that mirror the moves of a chess game. Duffy provers that chess is a waiting game and a game of war tactics, and in this instance a vehicle for navigating the complexities of re-presentation, storytelling and activism.

The exhibition also includes the artist’s 2019 award winning short documentary film ‘Delivery’, which charts the journey of the artist to deliver a letter from his Sahrawi friend to the director of the Irish company responsible for the importation of minerals exploited from the occupied territories of Western Sahara, and their distribution on the Irish horticulture market.

Duffy’s aesthetic is colourful, engaging and unsettling. We are drawn in by curiosity for the ‘collection’ of carefully curated items. The colours and textures tell us more of the environments endured in the refugee camps and those romantically envisaged in the coveted, dispossessed homeland.

*The artist describes the wall scupltures as ‘Sailí Walls’, making reference to Sailí or Willow trees, and their significance in ancient Celtic folklore, their invasive roots and ‘magical’ nature. Each wall has been named after a native species of willow.