CURATED BY DEEJ FABYC (L.A.I.) & SANDRA CORRIGAN BREATHNACH (BBEYOND)
BBEYOND ARE EXCITED TO BE COLLABORATING WITH LIVE ART IRELAND TO BRING TOGETHER A NEW PERFORMANCE ART EVENT CONVERGENCE.
WITH A PERFORMANCE ART WORKSHOP FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ARTIST ALASTAIR MACLENNAN AND ARTIST DEEJ FABYC CHAIRPERSON OF LIVE ART IRELAND AND CO-CURATOR OF CONVERGENCE, THIS WORKSHOP WILL BRING AN INTERESTING INCITE INTO THE TWO ARTISTS MODES OF PRACTICE. (PLEASE NOTE ATTENDANCE MUST BE BOOKED IN ADVANCE SEE BELOW)
CONVERGENCE WILL ALSO CONSIST OF SEVEN PERFORMANCES BY INTERNATIONAL AND IRISH ARTISTS BRINGING AN ECLECTIC MIX OF PERFORMANCES, WITH BOTH DURATIONAL AND SHORTER WORKS (PLEASE NOTE ATTENDANCE MUST BE BOOKED IN ADVANCE SEE BELOW)
TAKING INSPIRATION FROM BBEYOND PERFORMANCE MONTHLIES AN OPEN GROUP PERFORMANCE WILL BE HELD IN THE GREEN, CLOUGHJORDAN, ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND THIS FREE OPEN EVENT, PARTICIPATION FROM ARTISTS AND THE PUBLIC IS WELCOME
Owing to her training in the plastic arts, her work in performance arises from a need to eliminate the artistic object in order to create a more direct exchange between the public and herself, frequently involving direct audience participation. She tries to make the work aesthetically simple, by using everyday objects infused with an important symbolic charge.
She wants the spectator to clearly perceive the message that she seeks to transmit; or rather, more than that, she hopes that her work provokes feelings that are within everybody’s grasp, whether or not they are familiar with the artistic references, that the work is open to an additional, more complex, level of interpretation. This second level is where the influences of her performances are revealed; in general, in poetry, songs and traditional stories, as well as issues that concern her in her own social circumstances, particularly those related to questions of gender. Her performances focus upon notions of her identity as a woman, as Spanish and also as human being in society. She is also concerned with violence and the play of power in our society.
Art Performance is my main artistic medium, in terms of research and practice. To develop links between art and life, thought and the action. To explore paradoxes of the human condition. To treat my body as a field of experimentation, in a society that would treat it superficially or would instrumentalize it. My work usually starts with an intimate experience which is “translated” into an artistic action/gesture. An ephemeral action, created in situ, achieved with ordinary resources. To create not a product but a presence. In relation with elements (earth, water, fire, air), materials (stones, branches, leaves, feathers, blood, ashes, salt …) or simple objects (candles, balloons, typewriter, harmonica, grater,…).These actions are fragments of a continuous process, which is transformed by the space, the time, the meeting of those who witness it, by my life and its experiences. These actions refer to poetry, to its etymological sense of “do in the making”. Let poetry of life be our absolute weapon, writes Raoul Vaneigem, because it captivates without capturing, gives and does not appropriate, spread a vocation of happiness, which revokes the need to kill …
IMAGE | HELENA WALSH | FUTURE HISTORIES | 2016
HELENA WALSH
Helena Walsh is an Irish live artist, activist and academic. She has been based in London since 2003. Within her live art practice, Helena works with time, liveness and the materiality of the body; both within constructed installation environments and site-specific spaces. Drawing on her lived and embodied experience through her work Helena seeks to positively violate the systems, borders and rules that construct gender. Her practice explores the relations between gender, national identity and cultural histories. From her diasporic vantage point as an Irish woman living in Britain, Helena has examined histories of colonialism and migration in relation to issues of gender and labour, alongside the radical activism of Irish feminist diaspora.
Walsh has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sites. Walsh is a founder member of the direct-action feminist performance group Speaking of IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion), playing a key role in sustaining the collective collaborations of Speaking of IMELDA, contributing to the development of the group’s public performances, publications and media campaigns.
Walsh regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She has published in collections focussed on live art and also the performing arts in an Irish context, including peer reviewed journals such as Scene
Kane Stonestreet is known as a cryer, a lover and a pure spiral. Through their multidisciplinary performance practice they are interested in inhabiting alternative modes of attention; slower ways of being. stonestreet’s playful meanderings include dancing with chains and ice, carving a spiral into their chest, pressing their body to the concrete and reaching out to you. These actions may take place in the city time of clubs, galleries, theaters and warehouses, but Stonestreet’s mind is in tectonic time.
Stonestreet’s practice is based in collaboration. They have established substantial connections with Joseph Morgan Schofield, Eleanor Dalzell Jenyns among others. Their project entitled Collective Attention: Anarchic Action created a space for seven artists to lead and learn from each other’s practices. The four hour performance at Ugly Duck allowed for a flow of shared actions, through which Stonestreet found new qualities of engagement and entanglement. Their ritual actions reach towards gestures of radical softness and forms of queer intimacy. It is a process of survival. stonestreet is slowly unearthing ways of being that belong to their “we” / to our “us”.
Kelvin Atmadibrata recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy. Equipped by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest the masculine meta and erotica in Southeast Asia. He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations. Approached as bricolages, Kelvin translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (Role-playing video games) theories and pop mythologies.
As an expansion of his post graduate study, he is developing the language of queer abstraction and minimalist erotica in his illustration of the mecha and transhumanist fantasy. As an apprentice tattooist, he has also been experimenting on the process of image markings on skin as a continuation of his attraction to living sculptures, breathing mannequins and bodies as pedestals.
IMAGE | OLIVIA HASSETT | SCREENED | 2015
OLIVIA HASSETT
The exploration of material and colour are hugely important elements in my practice. Like a scientist I will experiment with the physicality of each material and object that I am drawn to. I will return again and again to explore its strengths, limitations and how it might transform in relation to its environment, my performing body, or other materials. Using brightly coloured man-made materials alongside reappropriated medical elements I explore the complex relationships we have with our visceral body. Often, we fear and disassociate from this complex body hoping that all the different organs and systems will keep working together and not succumb to fragility or illness.
Over the years I have engaged and reengaged with the notion of human skin as a porous liminal boundary that wraps around the body holding it all together. More recently my explorations have focused on the idea of the fragility of the human body under pressure. Brittle, hollow, bones split and fracture needing to be held together and supported. My art works seek to repair, reconnect, and rebuild a new provisional whole, one that recognises the beauty in our lived bodily experience, sunspots, scars, traumas, and all.
VERÓNICA PEÑA is an interdisciplinary artist, and her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. Her practice is motivated by challenging existing preconceptions, generating new understandings, and eliminating barriers to human unity; barriers such as migration politics, physical distance, pain, racism, machismo, cultural segregation, and death.
Peña’s performance installations combine underwater submersion, durational process, visual metamorphosis, and audience participation to address global issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, liberation, and women’s empowerment. In her work, stillness and confinement are a means to overcoming separation, and counteracting violence. The prolonged submersion of the body is an act of resilience against imposed limitations; a return to the harmless state of the one’s still in the womb; a search for harmony. Confined, the female body reveals strength, the immigrant defies distance and separation, the alive search for the absent.
Live Art Ireland together with Bbeyond are collaborating to create a new Performance Art event ‘Convergence’ Curated by Deej Fabyc and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach.
We are calling for proposals for six solo performances that will be taking place at Live Art Ireland’s Ealaín Bheo Centre for Art Research and Development on the 15th of July 2022.
We are looking for new works created specifically for the event that may or may not be site specific. Information re the space can be found by visiting https://www.live-art.ie/milford-house/
Selected artists will receive a 200 Euro artists fee.
Application Deadline | 6th May 2022
Application Information:
Please send a short Bio. of no more than 200 words
Please send a short Statement of no more than 200 words
Please send 3 good quality performance art images of at least 300dpi
Please send on links to an online source to view your work – reviews etc. (Websites or Facebook etc.)
Please send an outline of your proposed performance – (Please Note This Must be a New Work) 250 Words MAX.
Please Note – Applications are welcome in a non traditional form from artists with additional access needs. Please contact Deej at live.art.ireland@gmail.com or Sandra at bbeyond@europe.com to make arrangements.
Live Art Ireland and Bbeyond are performance art organisations that strongly believe that creativity and the arts are for all. We are committed that Convergence will be an inclusive equal opportunities event, which strives to be open to artists from every background, we welcome applications from artists of different religious beliefs and political opinion, different ethnicities, differing marital status and sexual orientation, gender and persons with disabilities and additional access needs, persons with dependents and persons without.
Proposed programme for 2022 In late February we will have our annual open call for residencies for 2022 In April we welcome the Pragmata artist duo to Milford house for three weeks to create performative environmental sculpture. ‘Our residency at Milford House will develop work that was born in a residency with the Bastioni Association in Florence. Using mud, plaster, metals, clay, we will build our sculptural practice of ‘growing’ sculptures from the earth. This project is a series of investigations using methods of digging and moulding in the ground and rock. ‘ In May we welcome Daniele Minns and Carol Kennedy to the house to create a collaborative residency for Bealtaine. In July we are developing a three day festival in collaboration with Bbeyond Irish Performance art organisation In Late July we welcome Ella DeBurca to Milford house for a residency In August – September we Have a residency with Simona Pavoni & Alessandra Viva developing a operatic live performance work with other artists from Milan and Borrisokane In November we present Alive & Kicking a live performance art and video festival here at Milford House
Contested Site: a live art performance by Kate Barry
Daisywheel in BarnGraffiti in BarnContested site live on Zoomthe BarnsContested Site live in the corn loft
Contested Site was situated in one of the old barns (circa 1700), on the lands of Milford House in Tipperary, Ireland. The first time I entered the barn, I knew I would perform there. I was struck by a series of etchings and some graffiti dug into the old, lime plaster. The hand-drawn etchings were daisy-wheels, or carpenter’s marks, and are known today as “witches marks”. These ancient symbols of protection ward off evil spirits. They’re found in the dark places of a home, or barn, such as a remote corner, under a sink, or in this case carved into the very back wall. Among the daisy-wheel etchings there was some barely legible, handwritten graffiti that read, On Ash Wednesday 1940 James McCormack and Peter Barnes lost their gallant Lives for Ireland. Gone but not forgotten. Whist lives the IRA.-P. F According to Brendan Anderson’s book, “Joe Cahill: A Life in the IRA”, 2002, James McCormack and Peter Barnes were members of the Irish Republican Army who were executed at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham on 7 February 1940 for participation in the 1939 Coventry bombing which killed five people. The men admitted to constructing the bomb but claimed not to be involved in planting it. The graffiti memorialized their lives and deaths. The etchings and graffiti were a strange juxtaposition between time and space, violence and peace, protection, and vulnerability. It was difficult to get my head around but, thankfully Live Art Ireland residency director and artist Deej Fabyc, and artist and director MJ Newell were there to walk me through it. They contextualized the etchings and graffiti by tactfully navigating my overtly romantic ideas of the site. They directed me to historical facts while addressing the overall taboo subjectivity of the place.
In Contested Site, my cis-female, queer body is explored as a site of contention in relation to the barn. As a relational, site-specific performance piece, I utilized cypress branches salvaged from the land after a Code Red winter storm and some dead bramblebush weed. I employed my body to make lip-prints, and I painted with a handmade brush made from copper piping and synthetic hair. The element of relational practice extended to the other artists on site, Day Magee, Deej Fabyc, MJ Newell and the dog, Ziggy. I performed for the spirits of the barns, and the surrounding natural life. The performance was mediated by two cameras, one camera was directed toward on the canvas, and the second camera framed the overall installation of the piece.
During the Contested Site performance I created a performance-painting in black & white with acrylic and household paint on un-stretched canvas. I started and ended the performance by holding a pitchfork and ringing a bell three times. Contested Site centered on four actions: sweeping the painting surface with branches from the cypress tree, creating lip-prints by kissing the canvas on the ground, painting circles with my homemade paintbrush, and whipping the canvas with bramble weeds. Each action was performed twenty-five times and the four performative actions totaled one hundred to mark the Republic’s centennial.
The performance took place on a chilly evening on December 14, 2021, and was broadcast over Zoom to an audience of about fifty people for the Virtually Live and Streaming exhibition that featured the work of ten local and international artists. It was produced through an artist residency with Live Art Ireland onsite at Milford House in rural Borrisbane, Tipperary.
