Idle Walls is a book cataloguing the complex solo exhibition of Irish artist, Bryan Gerard Duffy. This book contains reviews, writings, imagery, research, poetry and projects related to the highly appreciated show revealing the multi-layered components of Duffy's art making process.

The idle wall takes its title from the wall to the fore of the gallery, where seafaring workers would historically have ‘idled’, awaiting the promise of work on the boats in Westport Quay. This vital and topical work is largely comprised of four moveable walls and a moveable wooden ‘well’. The fixtures, which can be wheeled and moved within the space by the audience, are composed of a wooden frame and are un-rendered, making them see-through.

These ‘Sailí’ walls, as Duffy calls them, house and are adorned with paintings; found objects; small sculptures; cultural motifs, symbols and references; drawings; and a series of letters penned between the artist and a fictional, symbolic character from the Sahrawi Refugee Camps in Algeria, on the edge of occupied Western Sahara. The artist’s penpal waits with her people by a dividing wall, as they have done for nearly five decades, for a UN resolution enacting their right to return to their lands, from which they were forcibly displaced and where capitalist ventures continually exploit valuable natural resources.

"Ultimately, Duffy is a storyteller, and the interwoven narratives of Idle Walls are the makings of a weighty novel, on this occasion condensed into a short story." Ian Wieczorek