Giselle Harvey

Giselle Harvey is an artist-maker, educator and researcher from Co. Clare who works in a range of art education, community, and research contexts. She has a transdisciplinary eco-social art practice which involves both process-led collaborative community-based work and solo work. She has a strong background in textile making, performance art, art and ecology, deep sustainability, and an interest in the capacity of making stuff locally as a tool of social-environmental change.
Giselle holds a BA in Fashion Design & Textile Making, and a H. Dip & M. Ed in Adult and Community Education. She is currently an Irish Research Council Scholar undertaking art-based PhD research in the Limerick School of Art & Design to develop creative eco-embodied workshops to support communities to make social-ecological change. Recent awards include an artist residency at Cill Rialaig Village and the Arts Council Agility Award.

I am exploring the idea of ‘Living in the Interludes’ where I bear witness to, and make visible, my lived experience of illness and wellness. I would like to do this by creating vignettes using performance art, photography, and video, as a solo reparative practice. These vignettes attempt to convey my recurring intermittent extreme experiences between wellness and unwellness, capacity and incapacity, wretchedness and loveable-ness, pain and joy etc. My experiences of falling behind and through the cracks, of dealing with external agents, medical gaslighting, lack of support (what care could you need!?), and accompanying feelings of invalidation, shame, invisibility, and needless hardship. On the otherside, there is resilience, strength, creativity, hope, perseverance, mischief, magic and beauty. I dance between these extremes. Not alone, I may develop this research into a social practice with others who share this experience of endometriosis, and its harmful shaming medical history.