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I don't remember learning how to cycle or anything
But I do remember
an old Deaf man who was like my grandad he was actually my mums cousin
Telling me that he cycled every day and he never got a puncture
And I really need to be much more careful So for years I thought his tyres had cement in them
That there must be something magical that he never ever got a puncture
So obviously I was getting punctures left right and centre
I'm True blue dub but
Actually my parents are Deaf and their sign language users
I suppose my upbringing was a little bit different So I would have been brought up in a sign
language using house Which means that we signed to each other that
we used a visual and manual language to communicate
That comes with its own very special culture And my parents would have been very involved
and still are very involved in the deaf community It was a very different perspective on life I suppose
Dubliners are hilarious everyone's beeping at you, giving you the finger
I think it gave me a supersharp visual sensibility
Because the visuals I like a grammatical mode of communicating
And it also gave me a real understanding of oppressed minorities
And a kind of a struggle for recognition
It was very under recognised it was banned, I remember in public my parents telling me not to sign to them
Because it wasn't allowed kind of thing But of course from my parents to understand me
I had to sign, that's what we did very much in the privacy of the family home
The oldest girl child of a couple who are deaf Is the kind of designated interpreter in the house
So I would have done a lot of phone calls
I will the link person between my grandmother and my aunts and uncles, like hearing aunts and uncles you know
Or outside forces like bank managers, even down to milkmen
They are all going to mass
When I was a teenager I wasn't a rebellious teenager at all
I was actually super protective of them but at the same time I got away with an awful lot
Sneaking out the bedroom window and then just
calling for your sister to open the front door for you
As a teenager that was really great
Within that kind of freedom I think that, I didn't and none of my siblings, we didn't go off the rails
I started out in art college studying painting and really through a very organic process
realised that I wanted to involve my body more and started dreaming of these sign language
influenced things I didn't even know they were called performances at the time
And broke away from painting as a product and was looking at it much more as a process
The act of painting I became much more interested in then of course with more investigation
realised that there was a whole genre called performance art and I was like
That's what I should be doing that's for me
Often if I have a very potent image I Cant get out of my mind
Whatever way it occurred a confluence of influences from the day or just a mad off the wall dream
I usually bring them into the studio and I let them kind of sit there for a while until
They won't stop bothering me and then I know it's an image I have to do I have to get rid
of almost take it outside of my imagination and try it
And usually I try with my own body, Actions or gestures and then build up a whole performance
I would have made a piece a few years ago called yellow where
You are wet for about four hours and it's pretty cold, it's nothing major it's not like
Old school 70s performance art practice where they shot themselves whipped themselves or
cut themselves it's not that kind of grand masochistic Statement but it's still particularly taxing
on the body and you just keep going that it
For me personally my particular practice is completely dependent on bridging that gap
Of endurance with the collusion of the audience because if there was no audience there I would
not be sitting in a dress full of bubbles and wet and cold for four hours I would get
up and dry myself off
Cycling to a standstill
I'm convinced that actually the audience that attends performance are performing themselves
So they're not only an integral part of the performance for me as the artist as the performer
but actually they change things
Joseph Beuys a German performance artist famously said every man artist and certainly in the
sphere of live performance that is I would content the case
He was a performance artist he was a lot of
things he made sculptures he made performances but I think some of his performances are Iconic
significantly important works So I paid homage to him I suppose
In a work I made up here along the bull walk
So here she is my little beach seat And in very simple terms I just sat in there
with pinky kind of brown uncooked potatoes
That performance was hilarious because I accidentally told my dad and I don't normally tell him
about these things because he doesn't like them
Because there was no nudity involved I said it was okay for him to come along
He was here for the full 6 hours and almost hysterical he kept when there was no audience
around he kept saying please stop that's enough now signing at me
Yeah she's right at the top there saying hello
to the rest of the world from the island nation that we are
I've played around with the image of Madonna quite a bit in my work it's a kind of running
thread and so I just love all these placements that we see of her everywhere especially in Ireland
But this whole notion of a female deity that's
at once nonsexual but also has been imaged very sexually