Lin et lignes retissés : De la réappropriation de l’histoire dans « Cloth » de Rita Duffy et Paul Muldoon

• Published in: Interfaces (Dijon. En ligne) Vol. 38; no. 38; pp. 127 - 138
• Main Author: Serée-Chaussinand, Christelle
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; French
• Published: Université de Bourgogne ; College of the Holy Cross ; Université de Paris 01.01.2017; Université de Bourgogne
• Series: Crossing Borders: Appropriations and Collaborations
• Subjects: Art and art history; History; Humanities and Social Sciences; Literature; Rita Duffy; gaze; regard; Irlande du Nord; intermediality; intermédialité; Northern Ireland; Littérature irlandaise contemporaine; Contemporary Irish literature; Paul Muldoon
• ISSN: 1164-6225; 2647-6754
• DOI: 10.4000/interfaces.316

This paper focuses on Cloth, A Visual and Verbal Collaboration by Paul Muldoon and Rita Duffy. Muldoon’s poetic text and Duffy’s paintings were commissioned by the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown in 2007 to feature in a collaborative exhibition and catalogue under the general banner “Interrogating Contested Spaces in Post-Conflict Society”. Duffy’s images and Muldoon’s prose poem – which subtly echo W.B. Yeats’s poem “Cuchulain Comforted” – are all about delineating and crossing borders between domestic and institutional spaces; personal and political spaces; garments, skin and psyche; violence and peace; etc. Duffy’s images of vestments, shirts or handkerchiefs deprived of the human bodies that gave form to them; Muldoon’s prose focusing on flax-growing, linen production and sectarian atrocities, combine and dialogue to address questions of violence, power and impotence, posture and imposture, suture and elision, etc. This paper examines how Rita Duffy and Paul Muldoon exhume the past, appropriate it for their own creative purposes and re-view it, thus redefining the contours of the political landscape of the North. It also shows how this collaborative creation is about the whole nature of looking.