If the mayhem of 30 years of Troubles became part of the wallpaper for the residents of Belfast, the influential artist Conrad Atkinson has at least succeeded in redecorating one small space.

Happy Northern Ireland Wallpaper, the artwork produced by Atkinson for West Belfast's Féile an Phobail festival and currently on exhibition at Belfast's Grand Opera House, has found a permanent home in the city.

Based on colourful line drawings of the iconic photograph of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness laughing side by side, the wallpaper has proved a surprising hit with the disparate arts communities of Belfast.

Atkinson describes the photograph which inspired the piece as "more surreal than Dali".

It was taken in May at the opening of the new Northern Ireland Assembly when the two men were sworn in as First Minister and Deputy First Minister.

Along with several private collectors, the Arts Council has bought rolls to paper an entire committee room at its offices on the Malone Road. For Atkinson, though, the real prize has yet to be agreed.

"We're still talking to the people at Stormont. I'd really like to see the wallpaper being used to paper a committee room there," he said.

Another disappointment is that the real stars of the wallpaper, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, have also yet to gaze upon their smiling faces, reproduced in miniature and repeated across the wallpaper like so many colourful roses.

"I'm quite annoyed with them," says Atkinson. "I've worked so hard and they won't come to see what I've done! If they ever come to my house they'll get tea but I won't be serving them any biscuits."

Atkinson describes his return to Belfast after an absence of 32 years as a "gut-wrenching experience". Invited by the Belfast Media Group, he spent several months travelling across Northern Ireland witnessing the extraordinary changes since his last visit.

In 1978, at the height of the Troubles, an artwork Atkinson created based on the Irish Tricolour was banned from the Ulster Museum.

"When it was unwrapped, the guards refused to touch it," he remembers. Atkinson caused further controversy by saying that Northern Ireland was in the grip of cultural paramilitaries.

The painting, Civil Liberties: A souvenir of a wonderful year, was subsequently exhibited in Paris and Washington, outraging Sir Nicolas Henderson, the former British ambassador to France and the US, whose career path mirrored that of the artwork's progress across the globe.

The piece is now the centrepiece of Wolverhampton Art Gallery's collection of Troubles-related art.

For the opening of Atkinson's latest exhibition, Some wounds healing; some birds singing, Belfast's often divided arts community came out in full force. "

We had a huge turnout from west Belfast because it's part of the Féile festival," says Atkinson, "then we had the 'high arts' community connected with the Opera House, and of course the visual arts community were invited. It was an interesting mix.""

He believes that artistic expression is part of the healing process. "Art definitely has a role to play in the process. It can be very cathartic emotionally and, in Northern Ireland, it needs proper funding."

The exhibition also features blurred images of the Troubles-related scars of a series of unnamed victims visible through "gashes" in photographs of the rusting gates of Crumlin Road prison and a reproduction of an old Dutch painting of the Battle of the Boyne, depicting the pope blessing William of Orange, which was once slashed by loyalists when it hung at Stormont.