https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/display/2024/silent-testimony
Silent Testimony is a small exhibition of portrait paintings by Colin Davidson. It reveals the stories of eighteen people, ten women and eight men who are connected by their individual experiences of loss through the Troubles – a turbulent thirty-year period in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1988 (on a greatly reduced scale violence and intimidation continues).
Northern Ireland is a relatively small geographical area, and few living there were not touched by the conflict and the effect it has had, and continues to have, on thousands of individuals – the injured, their families, the families of those who died and the wider community. The violence resultant from the conflict radiated throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom and further afield.
This is a strikingly quiet, yet powerful emotive exhibition drawing one towards stillness, silence. Each brush stroke on each face painted reveals the suffering of the individual, and of a divided human collective torn apart. The sorrow in the face of Flo O’Riordan whose son Sean was shot dead, a bullet through his thirteen years old head; the trauma conveyed through the eyes of Stuart McCausland whose mother Lorraine was beaten to death by a gang, her body thrown into a river. The face of Jonnie Proctor whose father was targeted and killed on his way to hospital to visit his wife and newborn son. He is now the grown-up son haunted by the death of his father.
Recording an earlier time of civil war in Ireland the poet W. B Yeats wrote,
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
From ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ published in The Tower (1928)
The Artist Colin Davidson who was born in Northern Ireland has expressed his “sincere appreciation and gratitude” towards those who sat or shared their stories with him (each brief story can be read alongside their pictures in the gallery). He chose to document their stories without mentioning their religion or on which side, if either, of the Troubles they stood, believing this not to be relevant to their suffering. Recommended.
Silent Testimony, National Portrait Gallery, London until 23rd February 2025
