CULTURE: Moving walls — two very different exhibitions open in Westport

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.

A sense of Spain
ADORNING the walls of the gallery’s first-floor space is Deirdre Byrne’s atmospheric show, ‘The Long Way Round’. A visual artist who splits her time between Wexford and the Spanish city of Seville, Byrne is primarily interested in landscape. Scenes from the south of Spain dominate this colourful exhibition, while themes of birds and bird migration also inform many of the artworks.
The artist is particularly interested in ‘environmental psychology’, in probing the interplay between identity, sense of place and our connection to the natural and built environments that surround us. Accordingly, her artist’s lens moves fluidly from the macro to the micro – zooming out for an aerial ‘bird’s eye’ view of rainclouds and sandstorms passing over patchworks of developed land; zooming in to depict a snowy mountain scene or a winding road; zooming in further still to consider a cactus or a nest. Throughout, there is a sense of stillness, of a snapshot in time – brief encounters grasped and movingly preserved.
All the artworks are rendered on wood panels, with Byrne using a blend of gesso, coloured pencil and alcohol-based ink marker to create images that frequently appear painted rather than drawn. “I often saturate or mute the colours rather than creating a direct representation,” Byrne explains, adding: “I enjoy experimenting with how a material behaves on a given surface, and this process often guides my artistic process.”
Given the artist’s interest in identity and sense of place, it is interesting to note that working on ‘The Long Way Round’ enhanced her own connection to southern Spain. “Moving through and making work in this landscape has allowed me to draw meaning from and feel attached to this particular environment,” she reveals.

‘Idle Walls’, by Bryan Gerard Duffy, and ‘The Long Way Round’, by Deirdre Byrne, will be on show at the Custom House Studios Gallery, Westport Quay, until May 26.


BIRD'S EYE VIEW 'Cloudmap I', by Deirdre Byrne, part of her show 'The Long Way Round'.