Moving Walls
By Ciara Moynihan, Mayo News
CULTURE: Moving walls — two very different exhibitions open in Westport
Mayo artist Bryan Gerard Duffy and Wexford artist Deirdre Byrne open solo shows in the Custom House Studios Gallery
APPRECIATIVE crowds gathered at Westport Quay last week to celebrate the opening of two engaging exhibitions at the Custom House Gallery: Mayo artist Bryan Gerard Duffy’s ‘Idle Walls’ and Wexford artist Deirdre Byrne’s ‘The Long Way Round’.
Duffy’s multi-layered, hard-hitting body of work for this show is the culmination of 15 years’ exploration of themes awoken by trips to the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. While there, Duffy lived among the displaced nomadic Sahrawi people of Western Sahara who have been corralled into the camps since 1975 after they fled the invading Moroccan forces.
The Western Sahara War, which saw the Sahrawi indigenous Polisario Front attempt to fight back against the internationally bolstered might of Morocco, raged until 1991. Tragically, despite a UN Security Council Resolution designed to facilitate a referendum on the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara, the conflict remains unresolved and the referendum still has not taken place. The situation has resulted in one of the most protracted refugee crises in the world, second only to the 76-year-long displacement of the Palestinian people.
Duffy worked on the show’s artworks from his studio at the Custom House, which lies opposite a low stone wall known locally as the Idle Wall. Here, people historically ‘idled’ in the hope of gaining paid work on the fishing boats at the quay. It occurred to the artist that the people of Western Sahara have been forced to wait ‘idly’ behind the Dividing Wall – a 2,700-kilometre wall flanked by minefields that separates them from their homeland – for almost 50 years, waiting for others to ‘allow’ them decide their fate.
Weaving the theme of walls into his show, Duffy created large free-standing, moveable ‘sailí walls’ – un-rendered, incomplete willow-plank walls that allow the viewer see into their interiors and the thought-provoking installations they carry. These pieces include letters from an imagined Sahrawi pen pal from one of the refugee camps; paintings of botanical subjects, arranged in intersecting, chequered evocations of chess games; and multi-media sculptural works, many using rock phosphate – lucrative deposits of which are being mined in the disputed Western Saharan territory to be sold internationally as a fertiliser ingredient, stripping the country of natural resources while robbing its people of any potential benefit.
This dense, affecting exhibition contains many other poignant installations, each imbued with meaning – from ‘Watch Towers’, made with glass, rock phosphate and iron-on fabric vinyl, to ‘Slán’, made with turf, toy bricks, an Algerian/Western Sahara Dinar coin and shredded newspaper.
Duffy describes the works in ‘Idle Walls’ collectively as a “conversation on the societal challenges of retaining one’s tradition, identity and ancestral roots in the face of adversity, colonialism, nature, AI and capitalism”. There is a lot to absorb and meditate upon, and visitors are encouraged to take their time viewing, reading and reflecting – while assuming ownership of the exhibition themselves by moving the sailí walls through the gallery’s generous ground floor space.