Áine Phillips
On 26 June 2023 by Deej_Fabyc1Áine Phillips is a performance artist based in Galway, exhibiting and performing in Ireland and internationally since the late 80’s. She creates work for multiple contexts; public art commissions, the street, club events, galleries, theatres and museums. Her work is powered by feminist philosophy, ethics and politics: using art to comment and make propositions on subjectivity, gender and social change.
She is also a writer and teacher, promoting and advocating for performance and live art as a creative force for cultural and personal transformation. She has worked extensively as a curator and organiser of performance events in Ireland and the UK. She is Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art since 1999. In 2015, she authored and edited ‘Performance Art in Ireland: A History’ (Live Art Development Agency/ Intellect Books UK) and publishes regularly in visual art journals, books and online platforms.
Buttered Up is a short HD video made in 2017. It is based on a live performance in which I dive into the buttered crevice of a plush couch and emerge from the plumbing of a kitchen sink. In the video piece, the seduction and entrapments of domesticity are evaded with absurd humour and acts of performative metamorphosis. Butter is a central motif and as a particularly Irish material, is used with delicious abundance as a metaphor for transcendence and sexuality. Vivienne Dick’s cinematography gives the piece its vivid drama of colour and light. The dense and evocative sound track by Slavek Kwi accentuates the pleasures and pains of being ‘buttered up’. The piece subverts the absorption of identity into the domestic that can happen within family life especially for women, and for anyone who has had to endure a Covid-19 pandemic lock-down.
Aine Phillips Buttered Up 2017