Trinity College Artist In Residence,Rita Duffy writes for Culture about her latest project, The Anatomy Of Hope, a stunninganimation featuring original music by Rory Pierce, and dedicatedto the late Art O'Brain- watch it above.

Back in the spring, during the early part of my residency at Trinity and through the initial shock of Covid 19, I made drawings. Images of vulnerable human hearts and lungs appeared and from somewhere the spring flowers floated in through the window to ease the mortal despair - they became memorials to people dying by cell phone.

Through the summer months, the drawings continued; a resilient brain wears a daisy chain crown, we will survive this pandemic and live to tell the tale. Lungs appear wearing west of Ireland shawls, like gossiping women.

Finally, as we approach the darkness of winter, challenged by the hardest part of our collective struggle. I've arrived at a point where the drawings are segueing one into another, hope and fear colliding. Using this concept and adding to the visual material, I began the 'animated drawing process.

I reach back to the ageless rituals of Bridgit, the cloak that gathers us in, safe in its shelter, wishing trees and holy wells and cures, dark shadowy places filled with magic and hope.

The heart is pulsing, pumping out through vessels and hedgerow tangle, colour creeps across the page, covid blackberries sprouting, lungs inhaling. Teeth clench and bare, thorny briars encroach, a talisman to keep us safe and vaccine tied to a branch as amulet. Discarded blue gloves tumble like autumn leaves, a language of fingers and spring flowers promising to carry us through, imaging ourselves better.

The robust heartfelt kindness, experienced in Irish communities reassures me, all will be well. Ourselves alone, the ghost of a memory flits through my head. Superstitious ribbons and St Bridget's red rags impaled on thorns, - suffering on, offering it up, enduring at all costs - doing the right thing. Amulets threaded with nostalgia plead for a better future, a borderless place both snug and wide open a doorway never needing to be closed.

I want to imagine not the threat of freedom or its tentative, grasping fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness.

And once again I find myself inspired by the African American struggle, and the words of James Baldwin:Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.'

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The Anatomy of Hope - artist Rita Duffy on her new animation - RTE.ie