Two iconic shapes drive the main proposition in Rita Duffy's Banquet, a forceful show of 30-plus large (5ft x 5ft) oils, charcoals and installations. They are the lozenge, with its overtly sexual overtones, and the cone. And everywhere the tone is political. The title piece, oil and wax on linen, offers up, on a sandy ground, a watchtower-rich stockade such as the 17th century Planters built, yet the materials from which it is composed are those used by the contemporary British army in the North. At its centre, on the familiar red brick colours of an Ulster town, sits a mahogany dining table, its six matching chairs all empty.
In Plantation, regimented seedlings sprout amongst the stockade's furrows. In Outpost the shape changes to the inverted cone of an army reconnaissance tower; beside it hangs Dolmen, Rita herself, naked perhaps, provocatively posed, emerging Venus-like from a defensive Celtic hill fort. And so it goes.
In one finely crafted charcoal in the conical form, Speirbhean, another self portrait, Rita's skirts spread out to tent the land, pegged down at the shoreline by army observation posts.
It is, in all, an unrelenting message, and though there are the usual diverting diversions - the familiar darkly disturbing self portraits, Rita the child-woman wrestling (at times literally) with symbols of church and sexuality, the Drumcree cartoon, the postDuchamp sofa prickly with hairpins - there is a feeling that the task of filling all four of the Baths' galleries has diluted the power of the artist's proposition.
Runs until September 20th
