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Copyright: © Willie Doherty | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Willie Doherty’s photographic piece, "Ghost Story," really evokes a sense of foreboding. It's just a path, but it feels loaded with unseen narratives. What cultural weight do you think this image carries? Curator: It's the path itself, isn't it? A liminal space, representing transitions, journeys, and potentially, escape or pursuit. Paths have long been symbols of fate and the unknown in folklore. Does this specific image recall any local histories of conflict to you? Editor: I hadn't thought of it that way, but knowing Doherty is an Irish artist, it makes me think about contested spaces and the Troubles. Curator: Precisely. The ‘ghosts’ then, might be those unresolved histories and traumas imprinted on the landscape itself, forever shaping collective memory. Editor: That gives the image so much more depth. Thanks for sharing your insight. Curator: My pleasure. It’s a potent reminder of how symbols can reflect deep-seated cultural anxieties.
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Ghost Story 2007 is a fifteen-minute single channel colour video projection with a voiceover that centres on a journey around Derry in Northern Ireland. The main location depicted in the video is a long empty pathway – flanked by woods on either side and a barbed-wire fence on the right – down which the camera slowly travels. At other times the camera moves through a derelict area with lock-up garages, a dark urban underpass and a patch of open wasteland on which a silver car is parked with a man sitting inside it. Interspersed with the footage of these landscapes, which are mostly seen in a murky blue-grey twilight with some brief night-time sequences, are occasional close-ups of eyes (both male and female) that gaze past the camera. Written by the creator of Ghost Story, the Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty, and delivered by the actor Stephen Rea in a dispassionate manner filled with long pauses, the voiceover details personal memories, often concerning murder and violence, that seem to be connected with the landscapes depicted in the video (text reproduced in Fruitmarket Gallery 2009, unpaginated). For instance, the narrator suggests that the trees contain ‘shadow-like figures’ whose terrified faces remind him of a crowd of people he once saw fleeing for safety. This video is shown on a loop in a dark, enclosed space, projected directly onto and completely filling a white wall that is between four and six metres wide, with two speakers playing the voiceover. Tate’s copy of Ghost Story is the artist’s proof, which was produced alongside an edition of three.
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