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
... [Show full abstract] 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.