Reknitting communities: Rita Duffy’s vital gestures

Abstract

As textile is an apt metaphor for the complexities of human perception and of societal structures, it is not surprising that textile motifs have been central to the work of Rita Duffy. In Duffy’s oeuvre, North and South, masculine and feminine, politics and economics, the conscious and unconscious, life and death drives, past and future, are the warp and woof of this life-embracing artist. Different items of textile (school uniforms, skirts, shirts, anoraks, handkerchiefs, sheets, mantles, wigs, cloth dolls and knitted dolls) have been a metaphor and a metonymy for her main concern: the question of how art – textile art – can set people free. This article highlights the importance of the textile items the artist herself selected for inclusion in this issue of RISE showing how each of them point at ways to move from a power system into one of agency, from fate to destiny. Each of the textile works are briefly situated in the context of other painters (Kahlo and Picasso, David and Chagall), writers (Parker and Morrissey, Enright and Tóibín) and thinkers (Bollas, Arendt, Santner, Mouffe, Rothberg). Time and again Duffy’s textiles turn out to be linked to ‘the good enough mother’ and to women’s solidarity, both of whom facilitate the child’s passage from trauma to genera, developing from a negative past to a positive future in which an authentic self can be realized. Duffy’s textile language will be discussed in six sections: (1) four drawings predating the textile items in this issue reflect how the mother enables the artist’s disciplined imagination; (2) clothes belonging to ‘martyrs’ are so ‘othered’ that instead of holding the past they break narrow new moulds; (3) Cloth 1, Duffy’s handkerchief of Bloody Sunday illustrate how reading genera is a ‘seeing with the whole emotionality’; (4) this ‘hankie’ is further contested and contextualized in Duffy’s collaboration with Muldoon; (5) the idea of the hankie and laundry extends into the veronica motif and into an understanding of Duffy’s political art as a realization of Arendt’s natality, which leads to (6) Duffy’s most recent development of the Souvenir Shop method, where connectedness and humour are more articulated than ever and where the politics of culture involve multidirectional memory and economic participation.