Collaboration with Lili Spain - Street Live Sept 26th 2014

Collaboration with Lili Spain as part of Street Live

As part of StreetLive International artists were coupled with local Dublin artists, and worked together in pairs to create unique live art responses to various localities within Dublin city which were showcased during Dublin Live Art Festival 2014

I had the fantastic opportunity to collaborate with Lili Spain, working in the Arbour Hill area of Dublin 7. The performance took the form of a ritual walk from Montpelier Gardens to a vigil in Ostman Place. The result was a very personal performance, with both of us with differing family links and relationships to the area.  

StreetLive collaborations aimed not only to create links between each pair of artists but also between the these artists and their chosen local community. Embedded through site and local knowledge, these performances aimed to offer people and groups from within these Dublin communities, an opportunity to experience live performance art in a new and more involved way.  

With Many thanks to Lili for the Collaboration and Aoife Giles for the sensitive documentation.

    

Image credit: Aoife Giles 

All our Labours Return to the Earth - Art Lot Dublin - 26th Sept 2014

All our Labours Return to the Earth 

Performance at the Art Lot Dublin

The Art lot is an outdoor exhibition space, a project that seeks to transform a derelict site at the junction of Harcourt Street and South Richmond Street. 

This piece was performed on a Friday 5-6pm as workers walked home, after the week's worth of 9-5. This piece was part of Dublin Live Art Festival at the Art Lot

Image credit: Francis Fay

I am Breathing - Dublin Live art Festival 25th Sept 2014

Live  - performance as part of Dublin Live Art Festival 2014, at the MART 

Through focus on, and manipulation of the act of breathing this piece seeks to call attention to the experience of being in the performing body. Through fluctuations in rhythm, depth and length, I try to find the space between breathing as voluntarily controlled and involuntary act.

Image Credit: Fiona Kileen

Drawing down the diaphragm, ribs expand outward and upward.

Air rushes in, past the lips.

Hold,

a pause,

tightness in the voice box,

stuck in the throat.

Release.

Breath pushes up and brushes along the oesophagus. Feeling full, wide, tubular. Gushing out and around the nasal passages.

Chest slowly releases.

The final,

whisper,

forced,

out.

Central to this work is a struggle with questions such as: how can the gendered body show its experiences?; how can we move beyond prescribed identifications, and towards empathy with the flesh? how can we make strange the language of being in and representing the body?  

This piece continues my exploration of tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body - states of inhabiting the body, and being an image - as an on-going concern of my practice, which studies a shifting and twisting relationship to the self through the ever increasing prevalence of hyper-mediatisation.

This piece has existed as both a live performance and a piece to video.

Performances at The Quarry, Massachusetts, August 2013: Embedded and Reclaimed

Seeking to disrupt normative codifications of the body and its experiences,  and in particular the gendering of the body through relationships with objects and technology. How can the gendered body show its experiences? How can we move beyond prescribed identifications, and towards empathy with the flesh? How can we make strange the language of being in and representing the body? This work seeks to explore such questions, in a site responsive performance at the Quarry in Acton, Massachusetts.  Intervening in a masculinised site signifying, strength, progress and dominance over nature, through acts of wilfulness and resistance emphasising experiences a female body through material interactions.

With many thanks to Yin and Viktor at  Contemporary Arts International for their warm hospitality. 

Performance with Eleanor Lawler, Market Studios, Dublin 8th Nov 2013

Images: Matthew Nevin

Improvised performance with Eleanor Lawler exploring physicality, bodily presence and intersubjectivity, using strategies such as mirror, yield, response and resist. 

Performance with Eleanor Lawler, The MART, Dublin. 6th Sept 2013

Continuing on from investigations in Boston and New York, this performance in collaboration with Eleanor Lawler marked the inaugural performance event at MART's new home in the firestation in Rathmines, Dublin. Furthering our explorations on tensions between the experiential body and the spectacular body, this performance focused on the heightened presence of the physicality of body through interaction. An improvisational performance in which manifested the physical properties of body, space and sounds through strategies of response and resistance to stimulus.