Minns is an older non-binary multidisciplinary artist using dance, music technology, words, video and liveness. Immersed in the London queer club scene of the 1990s they were bassist in bands such as Leigh Bowery’s Minty and Aiden Shaw’s Whatever, and were a combat medallist in Silat martial arts world championships in 1997 while earning a living as a sex worker. As a mature person they took a degree in Dance and Music Technology, and began working with motion-sensing music tech in conjunction with martial arts.
Minns then wrote and toured mixed-genre socially engaged theatre: Get Therapy, Danielle Imara’s In Jail; made collaborative video art: Y&I series, Matters A:Rising and award-winning solo pieces, performed solo live art/cabaret at many queer events (Duckie, Deep Trash, The Glory), and facilitated collaborative durational eco live art via Be-coming Tree. Minns is a member of non-binary live art gang FBI+A, who have performed works at LADA and MK Gallery and made collaborative video. Minns has now returned to the exciting combination of martial arts based movement and motion sensing music tech. Supported by Creative Scotland they have begun to explore improvised continuous movement wearing limb-mounted sensors to create soundscapes.
STATEMENT
Minns likes unexpected combinations, believing in the supreme connection of all forms and all beings. By combining ancient, esoteric movement forms with state of the art technology there is a sense of circularity, a laugh at the supposed linearity of time, and the hope that the resultant soundscapes might have a cosmic resonance. Minns wishes to create new forms that do not answer the right questions.
Soren James is a surrealist/experimental writer and visual artist living in Scotland, and currently funded by Creative Scotland to produce a first book (a novel in flash). An intensely private being, little is known of Soren’s character except that it recreates itself on a daily basis from the materials at its disposal, doing so in an upbeat manner until one day its drained materials will be sumptuously thrown aside to resume a stillness without asking why. Soren has been widely published as writer, poet and artist in: Strange Horizons, Grievous Angel, Cafe Irreal, and many others. A selection of its work can be seen here: https://sorenjames.wordpress.com
Statement:
If the space between you and me is large enough that words can get between, we’re fucked. If the space between the universe and humans is so large that money can get in, we’re fucked. If the space between nothing and nothing can get a mention, there’s hope.
We are very happy to annouce that the artists chosen by the panel consisting of Lucy Day, Francis Fay, Kate Walsh and Deej Fabyc are as follows
Simona Pavoni (1994), lives and works in Milan where she recently co-founded the art studio Spazio Marea. Trained as a painter and then as a sculptor, she approached video and performance, focusing her interest on the vital functions of a body with its biological, architectural and socially derived manifestations. She has taken part in several exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
I think about architecture as a body, an environment in which everything can be host and everything can live. Architecture makes me reflect on the principle that things exist with their outlines. These outlines aren’t inteded neither as limits nor as definitions. They are filters that bring into communication the outside with the inside, letting elements to pass through. I think about body as an architecture. The performance upsets the dimensional scales by stretching the space. This space starts from the theater’s stage, in which the performace takes its conventional place, to the world, making the art practice free of borders.
Kate Barry is a performance artist whose work investigates queerness, subjectivity, and embodied practice through painting, drawing and video. Barry has performed + exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally. She has contributed over 20-years to working in artist-run spaces in Canada committed to the exhibition of artwork outside the mainstream.
From 2011-2014, Kate Barry was a member of the board of directors for FADO Performance Art Centre (Toronto). She was the project manager for More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women and she worked as the archival + research associate for the book, Wordless: The Performance Art of Rebecca Belmore, 2019. She was as the project lead for the MPCAS, an urban screen launched by grunt gallery in 2019. Currently, she is a sessional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (ECU) and serves on the board of directors of the Mutual Aid and Reciprocity Fund (MARFEC) at ECU.
My work explores the decolonization of the human body through the lens of queerness by investigating performance art as a relational practice. My current research involves queer survival during a global pandemic that combines the conjuring of ancient rituals for protection with contemporary queer performance art. While at Live Art Ireland, I’m proposing a 3-week residency in Nov 2021 where I will create a series of performance-paintings. To do this, I will collaborate with the land and make eco-friendly paintbrushes using sticks, rocks, plants, foliage, and other unexpected items. I will paint on raw, un-stretched canvas on the ground and use my paintbrushes as extensions of my body reenacting prehistoric mark-making methodologies. These performance-paintings will consider the queer body as a contested, political site that links the Milford House and its environs with its demesne history.
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Day Magee is a performance and visual artist based in Dublin. Since 2011, they have performed as part of live art organisations such as Livestock and the Dublin Live Art Festival, before pursuing a BA in Sculpture & Combined Media in Limerick School of Art & Design in 2017, during their time there staging group live art events managing the Evil Collective, and by their third year exhibiting work as part of Galway’s Tulca Festival 2019, in group shows in Dublin and Manhattan, as well as being put forward for the Future Generation Art Prize 2020 by its Irish partner platform Pallas Projects Studios. They are currently commissioned by Arts & Disability Ireland for their 2021 Curated Space programme, and a member of MART Studios.
“My work concerns the subjectivity of a queer sick body: queerness navigated via fundamentalist Christianity; sickness as manifest in chronic pain; the body being the site of self-conception as well as the instrument of self-reproduction. Experience acts as the dynamo, and the ensuing emotional interiority is the well from which I draw. My life is a question, and my work is its answer. Taking the form of performance-centred/performance-initiated multimedia, I perform images drawn from self-mythology. The work hinges on the mutual suspension of disbelief between creator and spectator, acting as stylised rituals, their narration reliable or otherwise, charged by the witness of the audience. Given that my work is confessional, and confrontational, I am asking the audience to believe me.”
Niamh Seana Meehan is a visual artist based in Northern Ireland. Working in-between visual art, performance, audio, sculpture, and written matter based on the slippages involved within the translation of thought to text. Themes include emptiness, silence, ambiguity, and doubt. Niamh Seana has performed and exhibited both nationally and internationally, recent projects include PS2 Short Residencies (2021), Digital Arts Studio Residency (2021), UK New Artists Common Interest Residency (2021), Catalyst Arts Propagate Workshop (2020), CCA~Derry~Londonderry DeMo Reciprocal Residency (2020) and HOUR Bergen International Performance Festival (2020).
My practice spans performative readings, audio, text-based installations, writing projects and conversations based on the slippages involved within the translation of thought to text. I investigate the unknowability of language, its messiness, and how language has the potential to become visual, performative and moveable. Creating sub-language, metanarrative, para text or language that spills onto the other page. I use live strategies to embody the act of decision making. Performative methods reveal moments for the in-between to open-up, there is a sense of getting lost, misunderstanding, stopping, and starting, and doubtfulness. The textual element within my practice investigates how language can be translated into movement, slippery rhythms, gestural fragments, jumpy breathes. Using conversation as props, the textual can take various forms in sculpture, audio or remaining as text. The props always provoke the performative, by means of displacement, presenting traces for the performance event. These often take shape as rehearsals.
Although we can not invite you come and produce work here quite yet we are announcing a call out for virtual residencies in the near future. The first residency call out will be called Methuselah and will be asking artists to look at aging, deep time and the landscape. It will be engaging with members of the local North Tipperary rural area in which this house and lands are embedded.
