Arlene Caffrey

Arlene Caffrey is a visual artist, researcher and educator based in Kilkenny. Working across performance, sculpture and social practice, her practice-based research explores the shifting cultural and sociopolitical landscape of contemporary Ireland and is informed by feminist and gender identity theory. Through performance and sculptural practice, she seeks to provoke critical reflection on constructs of femininity and embodiment.

Arlene is currently carrying out PhD research at Limerick School of Art & Design at the Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest. Her research is supported by Research Ireland. She is also a member of Bbeyond and Live Art Ireland.

Arlene’s practice-based research explores how gender identity, self-expression and self-actualisation is experienced amongst individuals practicing recreational pole dancing in Ireland. Through this she investigates how pole dancing can become a movement methodology for exploring expression and identity in a performance art context. Here, pole dancing is positioned not as spectacle or technique alone, but as a vernacular of tension, friction and effort. It becomes a bodily practice through which identity, gender and social inscriptions are felt before they are named.

Working through autoethnographic and ethnographic modes, this research unfolds across performance, sculptural artefacts and image-based works. These practices remain open and processual, attending to moments of instability, tension and emergence rather than fixed identity positions.

The residency at Live Art Ireland offered Arlene valuable time and space to carry out research through writing practices, as well as through movement and embodied action with the pole. This included movement experiments focusing on sound, alongside reflective and reflexive poetry as extensions of her embodied research.