Aepril Schaile

Aepril Schaile took part in the In-Between residency from July 1st to July 10th.

Aepril Schaile is an interdisciplinary artist working across bellydance, poetry and performance. Her work draws on mythology, landscape, and depth psychology. Her current project, Persephone Mysteria, is an inquiry into descent and return, communicated by a fluctuating first person and leaning into multiplicity and fragmentation. The work is devotional and posthumanist. She treats movement as ritual technology and spoken word as its dialect, both approached as forms of chthonic speech: the language of the underworld.

Aepril’s research has included site studies at Eleusis and at Irish ancient sites. Her recent performances include Cairde Arts Festival, A Tide of Ghosts in Copenhagen, and ESSWE at UCC. She is based in rural western Ireland and holds an MFA.

Aepril’s research residency at Live Art Ireland was generously supported by Sligo County Council’s Arts Service Department in partnership with The Arts Council.

“My guiding question: when the self is overpowered, what is repaired rather than wounded, and what does recovered speech sound like in word and body?

The making itself was katabasis. The estate site was a co-researcher: its rooms, its spirits, its recovering woodland, its libraries, its history. My days consisted of dancing, automatic writing / poetry, self portraiture. 

I veil danced with hundreds-of-years-old beech trees, the breeze rustling their leaves; swaying sibyls with rings of remembering echoing in their bodies. 

Poetry excerpt:

Dread combs my hair / brushes a strand from my forehead / braids lost mother lost daughter / gathers the ova of the dead / in her woven basket

I photographed in a kind of iterative catoptromancy, though here the camera was the mirror and what appeared in the glass was an Other in my own image. Like Persephone and under her jurisdiction, the spectre belongs to two worlds and to neither. She doesn’t move on, or recover on time, or metabolise her loss and return to labor. After impact, as linear time continues and she can see walls through her own hand, she asks: who am I, who am I, who am I”