“Can you imagine going to college during a civil war?” asks Amanda Kay Dunsmore, an artist who divides her time between Chicago and Northern Ireland. “Yet Belfast has the most unpretentious art environment I’ve ever been in. When you have friends who have been blown up, you’re nearer to the fundamental things in life that matter. Universities are a neutral ground. Catholics and Protestants meet for the first time because they’re raised in separate schools. Then they realize they’re so bloody similar it’s ridiculous.”
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“It’s an extremely isolated place, a totally different culture,” she says. “People have different ways of communicating. British people never went there because they thought it was extremely dangerous. They don’t come [to Chicago] thinking it’s a dangerous place. It’s a mind-set. But that’ll all change now. Belfast will be a different place because of the truce.”
Inspired by the attack, she played off a common sign in Belfast, spelling out “Stay Clear–Keep Out–Danger” in the gallery’s window using Linotype leaf prints on mortuary tags. The installation, called A Troubled Tree, contained 3,800 fluttering leaf-tags, the same number of lives that had been lost due to bombings in Northern Ireland and England since 1968.
Within Without is a huge wreath and a suspended sphere, each constructed of thousands of wooden shish kebab sticks. If I Had a Good Man for Every Bad Bottle of Wine is a male torso made of hundreds of wine corks. Organic Orange Joy is an interactive work composed of hundreds of warped combs strung on a wire. Rat Trap, a series of 19 strikingly phallic plaster-cast horseradish roots snared in rattraps, begs the questions: Who’s the bait? Who’s the victim?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Cynthia Howe.
