Katharine Maynell

Artist Statement : I am interested in the personal and the political, humour, feminist strategies and subjectivities in a lived world.

I make artists’ books, video installations, performances and drawings – pretty much anything that seems to structurally contain thoughts and action. These are often in series, as records of precarious things.

My recent initiatives have focused on collaborative ventures and shared ideas, where individuals and individual works are not seen as isolated from each other.

Not the point of origin or of termination but to be in the middle, part of a milieu.

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residency notes towards balancing acts
at Live Art Ireland, Convergence a Borderless Romance, 2025
 
Thinking of historical repetitions, technologies, communicated ideas and a romance of everyday
things The elderly speak of bread the way others speak of lost lovers I take a cup of milky tea upstairs
to work on my computer. [1]  Three windows out onto the garden.
 
Beloved fennel flowering over the veg plot abundance, peas and beans almost done,  brassicas barely
started. I pick the remaining pea pods, and soak them, changing the water regularly over two days. 
 
I am sitting in the kitchen talking to Work Away helpers about language and puzzlement over the
word hob, following my own confusion about the correct pans when using the induction cooker. It
must have been Saturday as I see from the chart I had put myself down to cook dinner. 
We look up hob, hob-nails, hob-goblins. Mischievous spirits of the home who might live on the top
shelf.  An image pops-up of a hairy, pointy eared person with two buckets. I make dried peas with
butter and chives.
  
Buckets and yoke turn over in my mind as a connecting image, with practical use carrying things
during the performances and linking their episodic structure. a myth reenacted endlessly.  In the same
frame of mind, I decide that a pile of cow shit could be dragged around all weekend.  
 
I buy two buckets and some blue rope, en-route for a walk with Deej on the breath-taking Silvermine
Mountains (Silabh an Airgid). [2]  It feels remote. We get caught in a dramatic downpour. Returning in a
steamy wet-dog car, Deej points out a fairy mound. And a few days later some evidence of long-gone
famine cottages, in the corner of a field by Milford House. [3]  The past haunts the present,
when memory, too, is a form of defiance.
 
The news is full of Gaza, this is present beyond the rambling garden here. Hannah sends me an essay,
‘Beneath the Howl of Hunger’ by Palestinian writer, Alaa Alqaisi, [4]  who asks us to share it, so I quote:
Hunger develops its own language, a silent, corrosive one. It does not arrive with drama or noise, but
rather seeps into the body and mind until both are softened, bent, worn. It lays itself down like dust:
on thoughts, on memories, on the fragile shell of skin. 
…it feels as though we have been stitched into a parallel script, a myth reenacted endlessly for the
benefit of those who watch without consequence. But unlike myths, this one has no moral arc, no
catharsis. There is no end to the horror, no fade to black. The children here continue to age without
ever growing up. The elderly speak of bread the way others speak of lost lovers. And somewhere,
always, there is an audience asking how this story ends. But for those of us living it, there is no
ending—only the slow receding of possibility with each day of silence.
Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we
search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is
a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none. 
Hunger reveals truths no one seeks. It strips away every comforting illusion and shows what remains
when there is nothing left to lose. I have learned that dignity is not a possession, but a practice—it
emerges in the way one endures, not in what one owns. I have come to understand that memory, too,
is a form of defiance. To name one’s pain, to record it faithfully, is to refuse erasure
We built language from ruin, shaped stories from ash, and held onto memory even as it slipped
through our hands like water.
And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it
not imagine we vanished without speaking. 
 
The world has been here so many times in so many places. It leaks out from the borders. It crosses
and re-crosses red lines. [5]

I have arrived with blue glass eyes bought on ebay from India, and a small pair of scales, they have
been hanging on the back of my kitchen door in London among aprons, my granddaughter has been
eyeing them back. I have a troublesome viral eye infection for which I am using steroid drops
provided by Moorfields. All out of kilter. I feel the itching pain as possible reaction to what I am
seeing. And (inadvertent) complicity in, amongst other crimes, the selling of parts for F35s. [6]  My own
weedy pacifism. The astonishing legislation of a government (I voted for) supressing non-violent
dissent. There must be No moral arc, no catharsis. No neat containment in a moral frame. 
 
A sideways approach with these small acts, sneaking up, with the possibility of it being
strange. [7]   Remove accustomed understanding. Where a flickering of sense to nonsense lurks on the
margins. Have pratfalls & a lightness of touch, hide the didactic soapbox or pull a rabbit out of it. I
look at u-tube tv with Tommy Cooper and think about Rose English’s timing and gestures, [8]  to try and
lighten the appearance of what is deadly serious. Although Cooper’s act relies on fabulous failures, in
the context of TV they no longer seem funny to me or particularly absurd.
I have not been practicing my balancing so I will likely wobble like a custard. I have felt foolish often
enough, but can I do it with aplomb? I should like that.
 
Props to use. The things, the thingness of the things comes into question. Easy everyday things
become peculiar. 
 
A tabard arrives with a useful pocket. Remember the lipstick to draw a clownish red-line. Scrape up a
bucket of shit from the cow pasture and put it in the barn with a slate lid to keep the dogs out until
needed. Put aside some potatoes which are growing eyes. Crows feathers from the back roads, stone
the crows. For a collaborator, a costume without drama. List of what to bring, buy eggs, white socks
and washing up gloves.
there is an audience asking how this story ends
some balancing acts as below in no particular order:
 
Balancing Eggs – a chicken person, balancing raw eggs on the rim of the garden urn 
Peeling Potatoes on One Leg – from one bucket to another & alternating legs until loosing balance
Tar and feathers – black goo from one end of some old kitchen scales and feathers (weighted by
stones) from the other, to apply to body
Two Buckets on a yoke – balanced at the ends of some sticks lashed together, to use as a prop box
A Glass of Milk  – balanced on my head while standing in shit
Scales of Lustitia – holding scales of blind ‘justice’ & glass eyes that can’t see it for what it is
 

Katharine Meynell, August 2025

[1] Jessica Traynor Powergrab: the hidden cost of Ireland’s datacentre boom, Guardian, 15 Feb 2024
   Frances Mc Donnell Report: Derogation (nitrates) decision will impact milk production in Ireland, Agriland, 11 June 2025
[2] To date, the soil and water remains poisoned by ‘tailings’ from extraction, & unsuitable for growing vegetables
[3] Depopulation from starvation and emigration during The Great Hunger or Potato Famine, Ireland, 1845-1852
[4] Alaa Alqaisi ‘Beneath the Howl of Hunger’, Arablit: A Magazine of Arabic Literature in Translation, July 2025 
[5]  Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly, December 1948
[6] The UK government has suspended a small number of arms licences to Israel, but are still hundreds remaining. Oxfam, 24.07.25. Parts
for the F-35 were not included in the export ban
[7] Rebecca Stott – Beautiful Strangeness, BBC R4, 18 July 2025
[8] Guy Brett, Abstract Vaudeville: The Work of Rose English, Ridinghouse, 2014

1. Skin & Stones 2. Stones and hair 3. ideas in progress rosebud

> Soil residency at Live Art Ireland, July/August 2023 (link)

Rolling in but not rolling over – a persistence of dignity and resistance against a backdrop of
rapacious economics and failing environments.
I have spent this time contemplating all things soil, forming a pair of texts. One as an
account of this time of thinking, one as a declaration of love to the material world.
On Thursday 3rd August I will present some soil actions in a more than human world of trans-
corporeality.