The traditional Maori greeting “Ko wai koe?” literally translated as “Who are your waters?”, meaning “Who are you?” or “Where are your birthing waters from?”. In 2017, New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant legal rights to its rivers and waterways.
This body of work explored the damaging effects of algae blooms in Irish and Austrian waterways. These green-blue blooms, known as Eutrophication, stained the rivers and further harmed fragile ecosystems. Duffy walked along selected waterways, focusing particularly on the River Moy, and collected plant samples from their borders. He brought the samples back to his studio, manipulated them with staining chemicals, and examined them on glass slides under his microscope.
The resulting sealed slides informed his vibrant air-bubbled paintings, dripping sculptures, and otherworldly photographs, as he magnified the microscopic details of life. The artworks protruded, pierced, contaminated, and suffocated the surfaces of the wooden-framed structures he created.
“Duffy’s playful attitude to materials and situations counterbalanced a very serious social conscience and political intent. The themes of his work included post-colonialism, media, cultural appropriation, and social, individual and collective responsibilities,” noted Alice Maher.
The title of the show, Hung Out to Dry insinuates foul play towards someone who has been left in a difficult and vulnerable position. The exhibition image presents us with a Sahrawi man hanging his clothes out to dry on a fence that separates his living quarters from the headquarters of the international NGO Landmine Action, which is based in the Free Zone Territory of Western Sahara. It is not only landmines that lie beneath the surface of the Sahrawi sands, but oil and phosphates too. With the assistance of Morocco, international corporations (including Irish) illegally extract natural resources from Western Saharawi lands and transport it globally for profits. The world’s largest production of phosphates derives from Morocco and Western Sahara, where it is used and overused in cleaning detergents, as well as in synthetic fertilizers for our plant root development in Ireland. Any excess synthetic phosphates overflow and spill out into our waterways causing harmful algae blooms to develop. In addition to the banning and the regulation of synthetic phosphates in detergents and fertilizers, what can we learn from the 2017 Austrian restoration project enacted along the River Danube, which until recently was synonymous with phosphate pollution? Can we be inspired by the nomadic Western Sahrawi people who continue to plant gardens in the harsh landscape of the Sahara Desert as an act of defiance and resistance? This stance is reenforced by the popular Sahrawi saying “Gota a-Gota”, which means “Drop by Drop, a river runs”. The exhibition generates an apocalyptic lens of this dryland as a precursor to our own impending climate collapse.