arlene-caffrey-logo-glitter

Welcome to my Art World

This is the website of the artist Arlene Caffrey, not necessarily the pole dancer Arlene Caffrey. As enmeshed as these identities might be, you can find all things related to my Fine Art practice here.
arlene caffrey pole dancing performance at grand canal dock dublin

Statement:

I am a visual artist and adult educator based in Kilkenny, working across the media of performance and social practice. My practice is informed by feminine subjectivity and feminist epistemology.
For almost 2 decades, I have been creating performing and socially engaged artworks through the medium of pole dance which reveal my interest in intersectional feminism and autotheory.
My current work is inspired by the creation of residual artefacts resulting from performative gestures as well as the exploration of the female form as an object and subject. I am undertaking the making of experimental enquiries of durational live performance and performative works with moving image, lens based media and spontaneous large scale drawings in this theme.

Borderless Digital Museum

Here are some works that have been recently exhibited in physical settings.

Subjective Object

Performance, LSAD Church Gallery. January 2023.

This durational performance was made as part of a three day performance workshop with Belfast-based Performance Art organization BBeyond, exploring the concepts of Presence, Subject and Object.

Prompted to use an object to make an improvised performance, I chose a pair of gold 8-inch stilettos.

In writing about Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, TiukaÅ‚o makes the claim that: ‘For the author of The Second Sex an authentic human being is an independent individual expressing both the subjective and objective elements of his/her body’ (2016, p. 82).

Inspired by the writings of De Beauvoir, I used this performance to explore the relationship between my body and my stilettos, as objects and subjects in order to find new ways of moving through space and time.

Untitled

Performance, sculptural artefacts & moving image. March 2023.

This is a performative work using sculpture and moving image with pole dance as a movement methodology, exploring the inevitable deterioration and breakdown of stiletto heels created from plaster.

Using these stiletto heels as tools and art objects, I explore how this destruction may ‘…give rise to opportunities for creative behaviour’ as the process of dancing in shoes which are designed to break forces me to reassess my prior embodied knowledge and skill in pole dancing (Engman, 2018, n.p.).

'Anemoia'

Group exhibition. March 2023.

Exhibited as part of ‘Anemoia’, an exhibition of works in progress by the MA Fine Art students at Limerick School Of Art & Design, in the Church Gallery, the ‘Untitled’ performative moving image piece approximately 7 minutes in duration along with the resulting broken plaster stilettos.

writings:

‘Every Gowl Has A Podcast’

Public speaking is just a vocal act of storytelling, a performance in itself. Since I am comfortable with talking out of my arts, I have been thinking that it would be advantageous to start a podcast about the social history of pole dancing in Ireland, through an autotheoretical lens. However, to my horror, I saw...
Read More

Performative Work – An Academic Reflection

According to performance artist Amanda Coogan in her writing What is Performance Art?, there is an important distinction between live performance art and performative work; the former being a durational presentation that takes place in a location involving an audience to witness it, and the latter a recording or representation of a live performance work...
Read More

Why you won’t find my art on social media

Carolina Are has written extensively about the use of social media, in particular that of Instagram, in the dissemination of content by sex-positive, sex-work and sex-work adjacent creators. According to Are ‘…women’s bodies and their performance of specific activities can both be a form of expression and a source of income’ (2019). She highlights that...
Read More

Get in touch:

    Not interested in Art?

    No worries. Simply click the button below to leave my Art World behind and go to the version of my website that's less filled with big words and more so with glitter, sequins and partial nudity.