Rita Duffy reminded an audience of Boston College students, staff, and local visitors to always seek joy and beauty in unlikely places at an event hosted by the Lowell Humanities Series on Wednesday.
“Only die when you’re dead,” Duffy said. “To love and to be loved, to never forget your own insignificance, to never get used to the unspeakable violence or disparity of life around you. Seek joy in sad places, pursue beauty to its layer, and above all, to watch, to try to understand to never look away to never, never forget.”
Duffy, a renowned Irish visual artist widely recognized for her innovative public art projects, grew up in Belfast during a time of tense conflict between Protestants and Catholics, an upbringing that she said inspired her artwork.
“Childhood in Belfast had no easy ways, different schools, different culture,” Duffy said. “Boys were in control. No monsters under the bed were needed with them. There were real men with real guns all around and fear was a ritual.”
But Duffy’s parents taught her that education was a means of ending conflict, she said. During her studies at the Belfast School of Art, Duffy recognized the inequality of opportunities between men and women and used it to propel herself forward in her artistry.
“She chose violence, I chose paint,” Duffy said, recalling once watching a BBC News report depicting the violent protest that led to the arrest of a young woman.
Duffy recounted her project proposal for “Thaw,” in which she aimed to address environmental and political concerns by having an iceberg physically towed to Belfast. Although the project never fully materialized, the proposal alone is often credited for popularizing Duffy’s work.
“I was told that there was a possibility that they were going to rebuild the Titanic,” Duffy said. “‘Titanic’ is the third most recognized word on the planet. I realized with that narrative, there’s something that kind of reaches a global population.”
These experiences, coupled with rising global gun violence, inspired Duffy’s creation of a chocolate AK-47, she said.
“All of these very sophisticated, artful young people looked at it and smelled it and started talking about chocolate,” Duffy said. “Then I showed it as a part of the Belfast Festival, and as people approached and looked very closely and immediately perceived the serial number on the chocolate gun.”
Another major focus point for Duffy’s works of art were women’s contributions during wars and conflicts, which gave birth to her idea for The Shirt Factory.
“In 2013, I was given a major commission for the city of Derry, a famous city that produced mass amounts of shirts for the African American Civil War,” Duffy said. “The women who stitched these shirts often stitched their address into some of the American Air Force shirts simply because they wanted to meet the Air Force men and possibly immigrate to America.”
Duffy’s Shirt Factory project explores the labor that women endured during wartime and symbolically recreates the conditions they faced. With this project, Duffy said she attempted to bring feminist values to light through her art.
“I specifically targeted older women who once worked in shirt factories to tell us their narratives, and we recorded it because up until this, there wasn’t a single tribute to these women,” Duffy said.
Duffy’s reputation as a prominent feminist figure was further apparent in her recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, where she represented Jesus and his disciples as women.
“This is obviously The Last Supper reinvented as a group of women,” Duffy said. “The whole idea was powerful and to represent the various women in Belfast.”
