Performance Art

Live Art Ireland

DEEJ FABYC OUTLINES THE RENOVATION OF MILFORD HOUSE AND THE FOUNDING OF LIVE ART IRELAND.

Analía Beltrán i Janés, Conservative Style, 2022, with Áine Phillips and Brian Paterson at ‘Convergence 2022’ in Milford House; photograph by Jordan Hutchings, courtesy of the artist, Bbeyond, and Live Art Ireland.

AS A CHILD I had a recurring fantasy world where I lived alone in a large stone house surrounded by high stone walls and guarded by lions and tigers. Come Brexit in 2016, myself and my partner MJ Newell decided to look for a building that would be suitable to create a residency programme for artists working with performance and time-based practice. As an adult, I had faced the trauma that made me feel unsafe around people and I was looking to forge new connections here in Ireland. I have been involved in several artist-run initiatives in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1980s and 90s and was director of Elastic Residence in London between 2004 and 2012.

We looked at buildings in Kerry, Clare, and Limerick, and eventually found a derelict Georgian mansion in Tipperary. In April 2020 we moved over from London. Milford House had been empty for 15 years and had become a home for birds and long-eared bats. Fortunately, there was a more recently occupied cottage on site, giving us a comfortable space from which to start the process of renovation. The main job was to get the valley roof and secret gutters replaced, as well as lime rendering the immense chimney stacks.

Meanwhile we spent time making the space viable for artists to live by restoring the original sash windows and glass. We collected Georgian period furniture from local online auctions to house my reference library. This provides invaluable research opportunities for our artists while they are here. The house also needed extensive rewiring and plumbing, as all the pipes had blown in the winter of 2012 when the house was unoccupied. We now have a space for up to eight artists in residence at a time, with access to workspaces in the house and the many stone barns and lofts which are repurposed as studios and performance spaces. We also have 17 acres of rewil-

ding land in which to imagine.

By summer 2021 we were able to invite our first test space residency and the artist Amanda Case Millis came and stayed in the house for two months. Millis helped us start to figure out what worked and what did not as far as the residency programme. Since then, we have hosted 26 artists in residence from 15 countries. The inaugural open-call residency on the theme of ‘House’ was juried by Francis Fay from Livestock, Lucy Day, now executive director of Phoenix Artspace in Brighton, Kate Walsh from Damar House Gallery, and me.

Among those selected were artists Niamh Seana Meehan and Day Magee. Confronting the colonial connotations of the ‘Big House’ in Ireland’s social history, Magee performed under the imposing portrait of Countess Markievicz, that I had printed out in a metallic tone with a gold frame. In Eat the good of the land (2021), Magee superimposed their queer, disabled body onto the trauma of their forefathers who fought in the Irish Civil War. Sheehan on the other hand, in Is it safe to float (2021), performed the brief in exile by taking twice-daily winter swims in nearby Lough Derg. In this Beckettian deconstruction, she questioned the role of Milford house as an institution of performance art and the expectation of her expression, creating a compelling sound monologue of lapping water and utterances. Similarly on our most recent residency, titled ‘Oppression and Compression’, Emma Brennan continued her core practice of performance and research

with dough, evoking this symbolic material with what could constitute Irish femininity.

This research continued in July with ‘Convergence 2022’ – our first micro-festival, held in collaboration with performance art organisation Bbeyond. ‘Convergence’ is modelled on the experimental Supernormal Festival in Braziers Park, Oxfordshire (supernormalfestival.co.uk). Bbeyond founders Brian Patterson, Alastair MacLennan, and director Sandra Breathnach Corrigan visited Milford House earlier this year and lent their significant artistic wisdom to Live Art Ireland. Curated by Sandra and myself, ‘Convergence’ was held over three days including performance workshops in Borrisokane and a group performance in Cloughjordan. The artists we commissioned for live performances at Milford House were Analía Beltrán i Janés, Béatrice Didier, Helena Walsh, Kane Stonestreet, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Olivia Hassett, and Verónica Peña.

To contextualise a few of the performances, Analía Beltrán i Janés’s participatory practice involves smashing artworks and imbuing meaning to random objects to create a more direct experience for the audience. For ‘Convergence’ Beltrán i Janés conducted a comparative dialogue with the colonial symbolism of Milford House and Spain’s era of national socialism by inviting audience members to hold nude drawings from her classical art education. Janes then disfigured the drawings with her teeth and cut free a suspended hammer to smash a replica foot of Michelangelo’s David.

Continuing the theme of structural transgressions,

UK artist Kane Stonestreet’s performances revolve around the biopolitics of gender. Their durational performance under a melting block of ice created a rural fetish scene, yet unavoidably referenced the urgency of rising global temperatures and sea levels. Recreating anti-heroes in anime and personas in video role play, Indonesian artist, Kelvin Atmadibrata, contests the masculine constructs of Southeast Asia. For ‘Convergence’ he shone a torch through the lens of plastic cups to create a shadow puppet theatre, then created a portrait by grinding carrots against the wall with his mouth. ‘Convergence 2023’ is already being organised with Bbeyond and we are increasing our capacity to include sound artists, contemporary dance, and live music.

And there it goes again. There are strange noises outside as I write this, not unlike the lions and tigers I spoke of earlier. The rewilding of the fields and woods have encouraged near extinct and exiled species like corncrakes, nightjars, and barn owls to arrive and take up residency here, as word spreads through the hedgerows.

Deej Fabyc is an artist, curator, and lecturer living in Tipperary. This text was written in collaboration with artist and writer, MJ Newell.

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Verónica Peña, The Enchanting Wild and the Mascaron, 2022, at ‘Convergence 2022’ in Milford House; photograph by Jordan Hutchings, courtesy the artist, Bbeyond, and Live Art Ireland.

Kane Stonestreet, Holding (Open), 2022, at ‘Convergence 2022’ in Milford House with Alastair MacLennon observing Kane’s work; photograph by Jordan Hutchings, courtesy the artist, Bbeyond, and Live Art Ireland.

Helena Walsh, Rewilding Territory, 2022, at ‘Convergence 2022’ in Milford House; photograph by Jordan Hutchings, courtesy the artist, Bbeyond, and Live Art Ireland.

Ritualistic Repair

DAY MAGEE REFLECTS ON ‘PERFORMANCE ECOLOGIES’ AT INTERFACE.

Gustaf Broms, There Is No There There, 2022, durational performance; image courtesy the artist and Interface.Noel Arrigan, Healing Point, 2022, durational performance; image courtesy the artist and Interface.

IN THE LATE 1980s, on the shores of Derryclare Lough in Connemara, a salmon hatchery was built. Commissioned by the cigarette company Carrolls, it was conceived as the most advanced facility of its kind. The word ‘facility’ extends from the word ‘facile’, which means “the ignorance of an issue’s true complexity.” Built too high above the lake, the circulation of water to contain the salmon proved too costly to maintain, and it was decommissioned. A modernist industrial shell was left nestled in the hills of the Inagh Valley. It has since been re-conceived by the Inagh Valley Trust as Interface – a shared base of aquacultural scientific research, and a studio and residency programme, lovingly hosted by Irish artist, Alannah Robins.

‘Performance Ecologies’ was a series of performance works commissioned in response to this placed history, and ecological futurity in the wake of climate change. The event took place during the last weekend of August and was curated by Robins and leading Irish performance artist, Áine Philips. A group of artists spanning Ireland, Sweden, and America, convened for the weekend in this storied place.

In The Microecologies of the Inagh Valley (2022), artist Eileen Hutton led participants in a kick-sampling workshop. Using a net to dig beneath a riverbed, Hutton demonstrated the collection and identification of tiny marine life as a means of gauging a river’s ecological stability. The specimens were placed onsite under a stereomicroscope, whose contents were reproduced as images on acetate. The process entrusted individuals with a creative means of inquiry into their respective environments, with curiosity posed as a methodology of ecological rejuvenation.

Swedish artist Gustaf Broms conducted the durational work, There Is No There There (2022), throughout the afternoon. The artist donned a denim uniform, imbuing the environment with his body. At one point this body was tied to a stake in the ground, which it circled in a clocklike formation, pointing at everything and declaring “I am that; I am that; I am that.” At

another point, the body fixed numerous dead roots to its head and extremities, walking backwards out of the valley at a pace akin to the roots’ growth in life. The unfurling work evoked the words of Cézanne: “I am a consciousness. The landscape thinks itself through me.”

My own work, A Fish in the Shape of a Voice (2022), took place inside one of the former salmon tanks – large, cylindrical fibre-glass structures now empty of water. Reclining naked, invoking Magritte’s The Collective Invention (1934), I spoke through a microphone, the tank amplifying the sound upwards towards the sky. The words, a product of my mind and hands, returned to the body optically and aurally in a feedback loop. The words detailed the valley’s history in a stream of consciousness, linking the salmon’s reproductive cycle with the fish’s place in mythology, and addressing mythology itself as a reproductive cycle, with sounds hopping across time and space from one human vector to another.

In the darkness of the main facility, where salmon eggs once hatched, were two film screenings. First was Polypropylene II (2022), from American artist Elizabeth Bleynat. The frame gazed through the perforations – the eyes, one might say – of a commercial fishing net underwater. From there, the net emerged from the sea, clinging to Bleynat’s body, which walked towards the camera – towards land – interspersed with geometric arrangements of the fishing plastic. Next was Coming Full Circle (2021). A drone aerially documented the long-term disrepair of UK land artist Richard Long’s Circle in Ireland (1974), a stone circle on Doolin Point at the Cliffs of Moher. Through these shots, we follow a group of the Burren College of Art’s students and staff, clad in grey, mirroring the landscape they traverse as they begin the gradual, ritualistic repair of Long’s intervention.

Over the course of the day, Noel Arrigan performed the durational Healing Point (2022). As one entered the grounds, a trapezoidal metal frame overlooked the lake, a diagonally angled bed of nails chained to

the structure. Over the course of two hours, Arrigan’s body, clothed in plain linen, reclined upon the nails. His hands gradually pulled at the chain which looped beneath his groin, so as to draw the bed down horizontally and back up again, slowly, centimetres over time, a metronome executing a single, prolonged swoop. The work functioned as a living timepiece, the organism and the product of its labour meeting in pain.

In the cool of the evening, the crowd was gathered in the largest of the salmon tanks for Tadhg Ó’Cuirrín’s I Hear Voices (2022). A karaoke machine was stationed in the middle of the tank, the microphone and the vocals it mediated passed from body to body. The artist surrendered the work to his audience, who each surrendered themselves – each body sharing the role of spectacle, each imparting the intimacy of singing its favourite song. It can, after all, be just as vulnerable to be joyful before an audience as it can to be in pain. ‘Performance Ecologies’ was brought to a close the following morning. Artists and audience alike sat and broke their fast together, in a mutual generosity of thought and food among nature. The art theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim once described space as an “image of time”. The spatial image that Philips and Robins composed, together with the artists, the landscape, and the audience as their medium, was one of hope.

Day Magee is a performance-centred multimedia artist based in Dublin.

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