Ashen, Restless

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Ashen, Restless by Willie Doherty is from a body of work photographed in Braddock, a town once known as the ‘cradle of Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry,’ before suffering from collapse in the 1980s. Throughout Doherty’s career, his work has engaged with the landscape as it looks today while understanding it both as a repository for the memories of past experiences, and a witness to the ravages of socio-economic change.

Doherty’s approach and process is speculative. Often taking an existing image or other subject as a starting point, he proceeds to see what can be discovered or found in a location. These photographs of Pennsylvania extend his interest in the relationship between landscape and memory and in working in locations that bear the traces of contested histories and narratives; some forgotten, some half remembered. This work was first shown in so it is, an exhibition of Irish art at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh in 2017.

Since the 1980s, Willie Doherty has been a pioneering figure in contemporary art, film and photography. His works typically begin as responses to his native city of Derry, and the impact and legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. They are complex reflections on how we look at such locations – or on the stories that might be told about their hidden histories. From early conceptual photo-text works – focusing on the impossibility of establishing any ‘objective’ perspective on this territory – to serial works in film and photography that set contradictory points of view against each other, Doherty reviews familiar places from alternative positions. Doherty has exhibited in many of the world’s leading museums, including the CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon; Museum De Pont, Tilburg; IMMA, Dublin; SMK, Copenhagen; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate, London; Modern Art Oxford; Dallas Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel; Kunsthalle Bern; Kunstverein München; Kunstverein Hamburg and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. He was nominated twice for the Turner Prize and has participated in major international exhibitions including Documenta, Manifesta, the Carnegie International, and the Venice, São Paulo and Istanbul Biennales.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

pigment print

Artist

Willie Doherty (1959 - )

Title

Ashen, Restless

Edition

Number 1 in an edition of 3

Date

2018

Medium

4 pigment prints

Dimensions

(each) height: 67.6 cm; width: 101.0; depth: 3.7 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Kerlin Gallery as part of the Northern Ireland Centenary, March 2021

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2021

GAC number

18985