Bogged down and common as muck! Only two phrases, but I feel their weight in my joints. I want to sift through my Irish home soil, seeing what parts of me are reflected in the multitude of microbes. Like in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto: “…nothing convincingly settles the separation of human and animal..….feminist culture affirms the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures.” Embracing hybridity, allowing it to lead me to alternative knowledge and exhume truths buried in the past. Its inhabitants possess my flesh and tell their stories. Ursula Le Guin writes, “People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels”. The imperialistic heroic narrative blocks these stories. I want to hear them all, force myself to dance with discomfort. I transform myself through costume, using Bakhtin’s lens of the carnivalesque as the mechanism to parody and subvert the normal, where I critique and collage ideas. Performing and embodying the slug (see: Feeling/Thinking/Being Sluggish) helped me to overcome my phobia of slugs and engage in radical empathy with the things I fear and disgust. Slugs are porous and susceptible to their environments. Thereby, reshaping my perspective on enclosures, productivity and access.
Following the concept of barriers and access, I am finding myself always creating hurdles within my practice as a simulacrum to the unspoken familiarity of struggling with being marginalised for my neurodivergence and queerness. We are restricted to crawling like the slugs. I put myself knowingly into chaotic and stressful situations, as the conflict is all-encompassing, similar to Pope L’s provocative crawling performances that highlight injustice in the mundane. Working in retail, I am constantly surrounded by cardboard. El Anatsui states, "An artist has to work with a material which is plentiful” This economy of means fuels subverting my surroundings. Unavoidable cardboard, it seeps into every crevice. Wood pulp and back again, ready to be shipped. “The debris of the past was freely used as the foundation for subsequent building”. Reusing the material to make new material is an ethos I have been trying to build on this year since I stopped painting with acrylic. Avoid creating more waste than necessary. What is then left behind is a formidable impact on the space, especially with ephemeral materials, as they degrade and are easily corrupted. Hence, digital media such as cameras are essential to capture transient material and works.
Although I struggle to write, I have been attempting to wrestle with making the process feel as easy as working with my other material, such as textiles and sculpting. Improvised methodology has been helping me let go of perfectionism, let it happen organically and lean into my strength in spontaneity as someone with ADHD. Similar to Irish storytelling, as everyone who tells it has their own version. Each time I have collaborated with Charlotte as the slugs Greg and Frank, the lines and situations change.
My practice has been buried in the centre of this confrontation. Endeavouring to make difficult topics like climate change digestible to an audience. When the artist Trevor Mattison makes sound pieces, he empathises with the audience and lightens it when it is difficult to hear. In a similar sense, I have been using absurdity and humour in a similar vein. Leaning into joyous performances rife with spontaneity and amateurism. Kindred to Jack Halberstram’s Queer Art of Failure, I am privileging the naive and nonsensical, I am not an expert, why should I be? I am an amorphous entity, my body a vessel. I am an unknown to them.
My project for the degree show will be a performance based on the poem: Bog Queen by Seamus Heaney. Inviting the audience into the bogscape and exhuming an ancient corpse disturbed by the turfcutter, we hear a story. We hear the choir’s cacophony when she rises from the darkened ground, but is lit with technology. Spectacle of a creature surfacing garbed in the remnants of her clothes, fused with synergistic plant forms keeping her alive. She decomposes and leaves her remnants, the story to be retold. The live element fits with the ephemeral nature of the bog body. Transformed by the earth, filling her pores. Hybrid and symbiotic, retted and reborn. She is the retrovirus, she is what we will become.
Bibliography
Guin, Ursula K. Le. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, 2017.
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In University of Minnesota Press eBooks, 3–90, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816650477.003.0001
https://www.frieze.com/article/rabindranath-x-bhose-review-collective-edinburgh-2023.
Ray, Debika. “El Anatsui — From Eating Tate & Lyle Sugar in Ghana to Filling Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.” Financial Times, October 10, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/c5fe7635-5de8-4619-b1fa-9937b0ea0513.
Bradley, Richard. “Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed. By Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether.” American Journal of Archaeology 103, no. 3 (July 1, 1999): 587–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/507021.