In the tiny mirror of my eyeshadow palette, I hardly recognise who I am anymore. Red lipstick bleeding into brown over my cheekbones and creeping upwards and across my forehead, hair strewn asunder. I survey the scene; remnants of chocolate are embedded into the carpet in streaks like the imprints of a wild animal roaming about the space, the chair I had been sitting on is not where I expected it to be and the only other person in the room, the photographer, is staring at me with wide eyed wonder.
I should explain how I came to find myself in the above scene. It’s late-August, the setting is a former convent in Dublin and I’m there because I’m making a performance-to-camera piece for my final Fine Art Master’s project. It’s an autotheoretical research-led performance art project that is based on explorations of my embodied experience, identity and attachments to signifiers in the form of sculptural fragile stiletto shoes.
Titled The Sweets Of Sin (a reference to a salacious novel within Joyce’s Ulysses), I begin the performance sitting in a chair wearing a blue sequin gown and holding a pair of stiletto shoes made from chocolate. The room has a stained-glass window, which I cannot see because my back is turned to it, but I know it’s there; a reminder that this used to be a place of quiet and piousness. Time expands as I breathe deeply to settle into the performance. As I put my feet on the chocolate shoes, they become fractured and abstracted. I slowly melt into them and they into me as I slide off the chair and pour myself onto the floor making slow dance-based movements. Running what was a stiletto point across my lips, I think about the wonder and expectation I felt as I played with lipstick as a small child, and then the shame I embodied as a teenager enrolled at a convent school in Drogheda, as my body bloomed into sought-after womanhood; I recall the feeling of knowing that I was inherently sinful, purely for existing in this body.
Although I know that I am only being watched by a photographer for this performance-to-camera piece, I imagine that I am being watched by the nuns who used to occupy this space. Biting, licking and smearing the melting shoes across my softly parted wet mouth, my body feels heavy on the floor as I writhe and rise. Completely melted, I don’t know how long I am in this flow state and at times I am not even aware of what I am doing. Yet I know when it is finished, a sense of completion free from shame.
Performance art is a new medium for me. Since graduating from the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2009 with a degree in Visual Communications, I have been working as a dance teacher, creating and performing socially engaged artworks through the medium of pole dance and the written word (on the subject of pole dancing, I’ve been successfully shoe-horning into every discussion of my practice that the highlight so far has been performing live in Belfast with Snoop Dogg as part of his ‘I Wanna Thank Me’ Tour in March). Making the decision to undertake postgraduate level studies by enrolling in the MA Fine Art program at Limerick School of Art & Design has afforded me the space and time to critically reassess my artistic practice, as well as my identity on a larger existential level. This became the overarching theme of my final project, which was exhibited alongside a live performance piece as part of the ‘Polyphonic Textures’ exhibition at the Church Gallery, Limerick School of Art & Design, from 5 – 11 September 2023.
The performances and their resulting documentation seek to create not only a sense of wonder at what a body can do, but to explore the collective consciousness of signifiers. Merging movements embodied and derived from my experience as a professional pole dancer with sculptural stilettos, a symbol I have come to associate with my femininity and sexual self, created from various materials including plaster, wax and chocolate, the practice is informed by autotheory as defined by Lauren Fournier, feminine subjectivity and feminist epistemology (as well as by a dash of existential dread and a fondness for the writing style of Flann O’Brien). The sculptures become activated through performance; their inevitable break down and deterioration resulting in residual sculptural artefacts that become artworks in themselves.
My practice is also influenced by the conceptual frameworks of Irish performance artist Helena Walsh, in making use of what she refers to as the ‘deployment of the erotic body in a subversive manner’ with the goal that it may provoke or lead to ‘…understandings around how the female body is perceived within specific contexts’.
Building on from this body of performance works, my aim is to continue making live performance with sculptural artworks in this theme and continuing my research at PhD level. As well as, I aim to finish my memoir, and then perform it.
