In Rita Donagh's paintings the personal and political are united, and the conventional skills of carefully measured figuration are brought together with mass media images and materials.
Donagh trained at the University of Durham and has taught at a number of art colleges including the Slade.
In some of Donagh's works plans of the notorious Maze prison buildings known as 'H Blocks' materialize high over the Irish landscape, while in others key political players disintegrate into the pixilation's of a media image. Her work on political geography and topography (an echo of work of artists involved in the first flush of landscape art in the eighteenth century, a number of whom tutored some of the earliest Tate woman artists) was seen in the exhibition Language, cartographic, et pouvoir (Language, mapping and power) held at the Orchard Gallery, Londonderry, in 1996. Donagh's 'map' drawings and paintings blur borders, messing up any sense of a clearly defined terrain, and Map of Ireland {1980) is now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. A retrospective toured from the Cornerhouse, Manchester in 1994-5. |
