Rita Donagh

Rita Donagh studied Fine Art at the University of Durham from 1956 until 1962. She then taught at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (where she met Richard Hamilton, whom she later married), the University of Reading, the Slade School of Fine Art, London and Goldsmiths’ College, London. Mindful of her Irish Ancestry, from the mid-1960s she dealt in her art with the turbulent political situation in Northern Ireland. Maps, specifically those of Northern Ireland that show the six counties of Ulster created by the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, became recurring motifs in her paintings. Donagh employs cartographic methods of geometric projection in order to problematize the relation between subjective experience and abstract representations of political and symbolic power.