April 2013
23 posts
You crouched behind me how long,
close as a shadow licked and sealing against the
cracks a body makes when its weight is shifting
– shifting quickly in these leaves that crunch as apples
bitten
and a mother you loved a long time ago saying
Was it really not you, on the stairs?
We’ve ghosts again, little bent over things.
Little things made for tripping.
Sue Rainsford
Psychic Silence: Seeking Female Spaces - A lecture...
Themes include textuality, the role of psychoanalysis within contemporary art practice, phenomenological readings of woman’s experiential status, and how these notions are addressed through writing, installation and performance art. Psychic Silence will take place at 6pm on Thursday 25th April in The Lab, and will be followed by a performative lecture entitled Unpacking The Box by artist Darren...
In Response to Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet
plane sky evening
Some moments found to be that which
took flight,
and which in taking to air lost its scent of butter and the sound of
a quilt puckering,
quickly and with the sound of tightness breaking.
In falling I imagine the wings are simply tucked, but
the window, though thin, dulls what I would know as
air in all its variations.
As steam, as semi-droplet and wind.
My...
An excerpt from a paper to be presented at this...
http://artefactjournal.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/2013study-day-schedule.pdf
Sue Rainsford
Key themes include new media, installation, inscription, overlap of form and content, textuality
The overlap between writing and visual arts is not new. Indeed, the early stages of art history’s canon is formed by artists drawing on texts ranging from the biblical to the poetic. The compulsion to...
On Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna & The Elders
Come close enough to touch your hair that you would have made wet, in time – in a few moments’ time, but the oils brought to you on this day that has made you want to bathe for its heat, its hotness, are gathered somewhere together we cannot see and will not be used to coat the skin you thought to steep or the hair you thought to soak.
You might be licked now or have your arms plucked, even as...
March 2013
8 posts
February 2013
1 post
Bob Wilson’s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic -...
Bob Wilson’s The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic is a documentary around the making of the play-opera hybrid by the same name, a production which toured extensively during 2011 and 2012.
Marina Abramovic has become safely established as the matriarchal cornerstone of performance art. With a career with roots in the early 70s, her Rhythm works, Seven Easy Pieces, The Firestar and The Artist is...
January 2013
10 posts
3 tags
Unit 1 Closing Event December 2012: A Two Hour...
Unit 1 began in January of 2012, with the remit to provide a setting for performance artists and its audiences, whether they be long familiar with the medium or approaching it for the first time. Taking place on the last Tuesday of every month and featuring work from both established and emerging artists selected on the basis of submissions, Unit 1 was held at the Exchange Centre in Temple Bar. In...
A Lending of Substance - video piece →
This work was projected in the window of Unit 4 throughout the evening, and features a reading of texts I wrote as a response to being in the space.
Periodical Review #2 at Pallas Projects/Studios: ...
‘Periodical Review is not a group exhibition per se, it is a discursive action, with the gallery as a magazine-like layout of images that speak (the field taking to itself).’
‘The exhibition, structured as an editorial review with a critical and discursive position, is a unique, yearly survey of Irish contemporary art practices, that looks at commercial gallery shows, museum exhibitions,...
A Lending of Substance at Siteation, Unit 4,...
‘..articulates a dimension of experience where it is not what happens, but the way things happen, that counts; a view of the world as a stream of percepts in which we are immersed, where individual acts and impulses are secondary. On the other hand, by dealing with the virtual, the hypothetical, the infinitely variable, and the performative, rhetoric reveals the unstable, evanescent status...
On Fragility
Wash yourself down as you did yesterday, looking out the bathroom window which is crossed by the exterior wooden stair, used only by the people upstairs if they decide to come down and into the garden. A cloth you had, a clumped towel, that you could enter between your sex lips that tremble when touched because, at the moment, they are sore. You can part them with your fingers but even at the...
A Response to a Performance by Alex Conway
A body given over to a chord and the cord that carries it.
In staring this long into the dark I have come to see a face fifty feet from mine that moves and becomes grotesque.
It is a distortion of the dark.
I know I see in this way because I cannot see clearly. I see in this way because I am tired, and the heaters are on above me so all this wood is red.
heat-wood-red
red-wood-heat
What...
The dizziness of these lights
is the nausea in your head –
this morning you fell from
your ladder’s topmost rudder.
Now, in waking, your
eyes have come to blur.
I remember as you leave another
time I watched you go.
You left in this exact same
way, an ache in the
hip from your fall.
And again, as before, this light –
which outlasts you,
will make a silhouette
of all our...
Response to Michelle Browne's Performance at the...
There is a sound of walking that is as wood on wood, that
makes the apples seem like toys.
Apple - thud
and
Core - thread.
They blanch from this side, the side that best fits your hand.
That’s the part the sun finds no matter how they’re left in the
bowl, the sun finds this part first and that’s where peeling happens.
A series of needs and confusions coming...
December 2012
5 posts
On the Existentialist Approach to Psychoanalysis...
The most defining aspect of existential psychoanalysis, and the one which most lends to its humanistic tendencies, is the belief that man is a totality. He is not an assembled collection of things/drives, he is a unique individual – this trait of the patient cannot be ignored in terms of his personality and situation within the world, in unavoidable. Every time he performs some act or makes a...
Walking as Practice: Accessing the Stratified Past
As part of my ongoing research involving Georges Perec, our interaction with daily life, and our means of response and documentation, I’ve written a piece outlining possible means of intervention an individual may exert in the face of a body such as history.
Within the city there is the individual. Within the city there is history. History and the individual are capable of fusion, and...
A Lending of Substance
This will be the first showing of work representing a larger body of research centred on methods of critiquing the everyday. Engaging with the daily with to the extent that it becomes transformative has been propagated as both a theoretical necessity and an aesthetic response by such writers and theorists as John Berger and Georges Perec. In their approach to everyday life a certain dismantling...
Writing Between Art and Audience: Art Writing as...
Through art writing, a space for aesthetic engagement should not only be created, but rendered an infinite, constant point of access. In this way the textual object is also an art object. There is an urgency to its lasting forever.
Critical writing has long been pervaded by the notion that its aim is – or should be, to grant language to art objects, while assuming no such status for itself. This...
November 2012
3 posts
Who Even Dances Anymore
There are certain clothes that in wearing them I am ready to do different things. I have on an old woollen jumper that still smells of the sheep it nuded (it occurs to me now it has probably been washed only once, if at all) and when I wear it I can make a sketch and think to myself a few things about the human form, some twists anatomy makes so that an arm looks like a bunched scarf, or a leg the...
Notes and Quotes from Georges Perec's Species of...
There is an urge behind creating writing that functions as experiential testimony, namely to forge a genuine trace that functions as a point of emotive return to a moment in time, and documents and preserves that moment for its own sake.
‘I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be...
