Dirty Little Fuckbird, was exhibited at ‘Breaking the Patterns Vol. 2.0’ at the GalerĂa del Antiquarium, Sevilla from 11 July – 11 August 2024.
This selection of these ceramic sculptures, image-based works and live performance are the results from a 3-month residency funded by Capacity Ireland, Artlinks, Third Sector International, Lab Sevilla, Creative Europe and the European Commission.
My artist statement for this body of work reads: Exploring the dance between public and private expression, the modest and obscene, the immediate and the permanent, this practice aims to challenge how the female body and sexual-self is perceived in cultures which are underpinned by patriarchal ideas.
Embodied experience and the subjective feminine self are expressed through sculptural artefacts, live performance and image-based works, which are inspired by my lived experience as an Irish woman in Sevilla and my observed patterns of everyday misogyny by local men.
Ceramic panties and portraits of the artist explore the collective consciousness of signifiers surrounding female sexual expression, decency and visceral lust.
The live performance (which I have video highlights for here) is informed by the private letters of celebrated modernist Irish writer James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle; explicit sexual self-expression, lust and yearning meet with deconstructed erotic dancing.
As I mentioned in the above blog about the performance, the digital images of nude portraits (of myself) on display were created as part of my time on residency in Sevilla, in collaboration with Spanish artist Inma Ortega. These images were prohibited from being displayed in the gallery by request of management, which has a ban on female nudity specifically. I was able to display the images by censoring them to the gallery specifications, which I did by placing excerpts from these sexually explicit letters from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle; a single line of profane text over a white background to cover my nipples.
I distributed tiny copies of these uncensored nude portraits to audience members in attendance at the live performance.
My project sought to subvert and challenge dominant narratives about what it means to exist as a female sexual being. The research context was the changing cultural and socio-political landscape of contemporary Ireland, where evolved ideas about feminism, embodied expression and sexual liberation are more prevalent than in Spain. Daily encounters of cat-calling on the street, unsolicited advances and aggression from men that I experienced informed the direction of my work whilst living in Sevilla.
I also have a video of a short artist talk that I gave during the exhibition run here, if you’d like to hear me talk about my art!
