Thirdspace in Willie Doherty’s Photo-Text Diptychs of Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article explores the visual artist Willie Doherty’s use of the photo-text diptych in works produced in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. An examination of Doherty’s photo-text diptychs demonstrates what the postmodern geographer Edward Soja has called ‘Thirdspace’ – a flexible way of thinking about fluctuating milieux of ideas, events, appearances and representations, and how these affect the ways geographical spaces change, both materially and in the way they are perceived. This article argues that through the photo-text diptych Doherty invokes a Thirdspace, where representations of landscape, word, image and identity all converge spatially. This creates a borderland analogous to that separating Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic.