Day Magee

“In the storied borders of the Milford House estate in Tipperary, its socio-geographically contested status reflecting Ireland’s itself, so too are paralleled dynamics of the contested social psychology of the queer sick body. In ‘Eat the Good of the Land’, I situate my body – a vector of its own queerness and chronic illness, and its own ancestry participating in the Irish War of Independence – in this repeatedly reclaimed space, imbuing this ambivalent body with one of the site’s primary materials and resources, the soil of the land itself. I was drawn to the images that now adorn the rooms of the house as selected by Deej Fabyc of Live Art ireland, including that of Countess Markievicz in military garb, and that of the 18th century tenor Pierre Jélyotte dressed as a woman, the queerness of these images as well as my own body as having incongruences with this space.Coming to Milford represented an intervention both physically and spiritually in my practice, a pivot from looking inward to looking outward. My work involves analysing my own subjectivity as it is recorded in my body, but Milford explicitly drew out how I related to a specific site’s psychogeography, as well as its history as shared by Ireland at large under colonisation. It inspired me to look deeper into my own lineage, to question if me in my queerness were really someone who my ancestors had fought and been traumatised for – did I embody the freedom they’d imagined, and if not, how could I?”