Barber, F., 2019.

Severance: Rita duffy's paintings and the affective arctic

This chapter explores a group of paintings made by the Northern Irish artist Rita Duffy deriving from a residency (2010) at the Kysten Arts Centre near Tromsø in Northern Norway. The series Severance (2011) marks a significant transition in Duffy's practice from paintings focused around the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland to more complex and interactive projects based on aspects of Irish history and contemporary politics. The paintings' affective engagement with the imagery and environment of the Arctic becomes a means of staging traumatic scenarios of maternal loss and homelessness drawn from both autobiography and the more collective experience of post-conflict Northern Ireland. However in addition to this sense of transnational displacement the chapter argues that these works also engage with the construction of Arcticism as a discursive formation of the far North, in addition to tracing aspects of its genealogy within Irish art from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as a means of providing a further level of meaning for Duffy's work emerging from her own visit to Tromsø.