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The
conflict between a man and a woman, a warmonger and a healer, an incompatible
couple, is mirrored by a gender conflict within the same body. Bittersweet
childhood memories are recounted across a divided landscape and through
troubled dreamscapes as the splits, subconscious fears and conflicts
that rage under one roof, rage in one body. Farmyard antics, acts of
kindness and cruelty metaphorically merge with the affection and violence,
the pain and pleasure within close human relationships. As the complexities
of such conflicts are played out across the artist’s physical
body, seemingly strict divisions are confused. Buried realities return
to haunt, highlighting that in the shadow of victorious battles there
lies shame, in the shadow of autonomy there lies repression. Through a visually rich and descriptive account, the artist’s roots in rural Ireland are explored. “ MOM - Marks Of Motherlands” details the intimate history of the artist’s Grandparents, children of tremendous global and national turmoil. Tracing the influence of such unrest within their lives and relationship the performance strongly collides the personal with the political. Layering this collision with a graphically personal account of the artist’s battle to dispel the traditional gendered roles she faced as a young woman, Unified by the theme of impotency and fertility, the artist’s “uneasy womanliness” parallels with the uneasy political history of Ireland, providing a double-barrelled history of her “Motherland” As famine and hunger strikes physically resonate again following a failure to nurture, a painful past meets a painful present, a reminder that making peace is never easy. |
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