Embodied Research

and

Movement Workshops

Conversing with Filmic Bodies

and

Irigarayian Air

to

Offer Potentials

to

Reorientate

the Irish Catholic Maternal

in the Mother and Daughter Relation

I hope to open spaces, where together we can

breathe

move

feel

hold

the polyphony of voices of the Irish Catholic women from the 1950s who left the Irish countryside for London, due to ‘out-of-wedlock’ pregnancies.

These voices inspire my research and embodied practice.

This research and practice hopes to think with these women and the transgenerational ripples that are felt in the relation of mothers and daughters, to offer a reorientation.

“Soon, we will weave the spaces as we speak.

Together, we breathe these words, inhaling and holding them, if only for a second, before we have to exhale again.

We do not determine the space that surrounds us, between us, that passes as shared air,

if only for a moment.

We breathe, we move, we feel.”

These words were written collectively with Graduate Tutor and PhD researcher, Killian O’ Dwyer as part of counterfield, research collective.

‘Air becomes the air of curiosity’.

Jesse Jones.- The Tower

I invite you to join me to read this text collectively in this moment across different temporalities as it arrives to you and to upcoming embodied research and movement workshops.

Objects moved to the side within the institutional spaces we meet.

Just for the duration of our time together.

We determined the space collectively.

We dance with and are affected by the air around us, whilst forgetting the earth.

These workshops are shared spaces where I ask you to engage in ways you feel comfortable with.

Come and go as you want to.

There are no calls to perform, move or be in any way.

Remember to breathe.

We will explore together ways of conversing between our individual and collective bodies and that of the textual and filmic bodies that ‘hold’ with care the voices of the Irish Catholic maternal.

Voices that

allude,

resist,

disappear,

emerge,

re-remember,

are felt

and won’t be held

I offer a hand to explore the defiant gestures of the Irish Catholic maternal that became ways of negation within framings of the Catholicism and the Irish state and seek a reorientation together.

My film practice and the embodied workshops seek to explore collectively the transgenerational psychic traces of the Irish Catholic maternal in my own body.

Remember to breathe.

As we move, we do so with uncertainty and unknowing, through conditions and materiality of

audio,

video,

digital rhythms,

wifi interruptions,

text and

memory spaces.

We come together physically in upcoming spaces, our bodies and breath that vibrate with the filmic bodies that come to converse with us.

Bodies of Water

All the embodied research and movement workshops open a space for members to introduce themselves through a body of water that has stayed with them.

To meet each other as we are in this moment

Whilst the filmic body plays I invite people in the room to:

‘listen with your body,

allow your memory spaces to flow to bodies of water that come to you,

that hold you,

that trouble you,

that disrupt,

that care,

that respond,

that elude,

that move amongst us.

We enter this moment together, unknowing together.

There is no call to share, take this time to just listen if you don’t feel comfortable sharing.’

We will feel with our bodies and

think with Irish emotions that are always felt on the body

Bodies of water have flowed throughout my research, since feeling their presence, which had been there all along, by taking part in Ocean as Archive module facilitated by Dr Lenka Vráblíková on the Masters in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Let’s pause, and listen to these words in our body.

Here I think with the voice of Phoebe Boswell, who was the 2022 Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, this included a workshop by Black Blossoms, the day opened with an opportunity to consider the people who gathered in relation to bodies of water to reflect on the Black experience of swimming; its attendant historical legacies, and how they shape personal and collective fears and desires that have come to be associated with water. I move to Irish artist’s Jesse Jones’ proposition of the

collective power of the mass,

or a multitudinous body,

and the importance of attending to personal and collective fears and desires when we converse with care in relation to bodies of water.

What bodies of water that have stayed with you?

Remember to breathe.

Remember to breathe.

My focus is the relation between mother and daughter in the Irish Catholic maternal.

Throughout, I will refer to the Catholic Irish maternal, which will inhabit this focus on the relation between mother and daughter.

This research and practice hopes to think with the women that left the Irish countryside in 1950s to get married in secret whilst pregnant, but the relation from this time on is on those that consider themselves mother and daughter.

The repetition is intentional, as we hold the shared breath.

I refer to the ‘Catholic’ maternal and this is to speak to the spaces these women are navigating across generations, whether individuals feel they are lapsed, practising, recovering, not brought up Catholic, and all ways of identifying or not.

The Irish Catholic maternal thinks with the contemporary psychic traces that are embodied in my own body,

gestures

and

physical spaces

I navigate and that of others.

Moving

with

transgenerational

psychic traces of touch by

the Irish State and Catholicism

(inspired by the work of Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne - Touching Contract)

as they converse with defiant gestures of negotiation in the body. Bodily traces that move between the touch of the Irish State and Catholicism and conditions of being Irish Catholic in London in the 1950s.

My current film practice and embodied research moves constantly between spaces in Ireland and London. Embodying the women I hope to speak with care with and my own living relation to this research.

The motivation for the embodied workshop spaces of my practice was to move away from a ‘film screening’ with an audience or films that act as evidence of research practice but to offer an embodied ‘viewing’ through different entry points to filmic bodies, activating openings for bodies within these spaces to move and respond in ways that feel comfortable to them.

This practice seeks to mobilises a space to feel with the entanglement of air and water; to breathe and move with a reorientation and defiance and complexities of the ‘livedness’ of the Irish Catholic maternal via the flows and intensities of feminine bodies off screen that agitate the Irish, English and ‘Catholic’ bodies of water.

I am currently filming in spaces in Ireland and London.

Remember to breathe.

Last time I left Dublin I felt a sudden deep grief and at a loss,

moving

unwillingly

through thick mud

back to London.

The constantly movement has become unexpectedly unnegotiable

My practice seeks to hold and speak aloud the words of these women in spaces in Ireland and London that were/are framed by Catholicism and the State, but were/are spaces that women have sought

gestures of

negotiation

with its authority.

The repetition is intentional, as we hold the shared breath.

Remember to breathe.

The words are felt bodily through

my breath

and as it converses with

filmic breath.

These filmic bodies come to converse collectively with all that come to the embodied research and movement spaces.

These spaces have taken place in London but it feels important that they take place in both Ireland and London. The Irish Catholic maternal in the research constantly moves between Ireland and London and I explore how these voices are ‘held’ in both spaces and the in-betweens.

I place London instead of England or the United Kingdom as my focus is on the women who came to London in the 1950s.

Remember to breathe.

As I began this research, I resisted my inhabitation within the practice, even though it began with a letter that belonged to my aunt, in conversation with my mother, which is stored in her suitcase, in a bedroom at my parent’s house in London. Its resting place for many decades.

The ‘Feminine-to-Come’ that I position to navigate a reorientation is repeatedly invoked in Drusilla Cornell’s “Introduction: Writing the Mamafesta: The Dilemma of Postmodern Feminism”, the ‘not-yet’ and ‘still-to-come’ is embodied in the discovery/rediscovery of the letter.

‘The letter is always, already being written. The ultimate proclamation of the mamafesta is anticipated but never finally delivered’

The circulation between generations of women that Cornell speaks of, mirrors the letter that is in circulation within this research and practice, that is being rewritten, and recirculated, which is that of my Irish aunt’s breathy letter to my mother in the 1950s before her untimely death. It is important for the letter’s content to mostly remain with its familial circulation, yet its embodiment is felt through my filmic practice and the interventions of the ‘Feminine-to-Come’.

The writing within this letter offers revelations of a

spirited and joyous elusivity

to evade being ‘captured’ by the framings of the Catholic Church.

Hand-written letters form parts of the workshops,

as we read aloud together.

To position our bodies within the workshops space,

with the traces of Ireland today

and the voices in Irish contemporary art

Remember to breathe.

Movement,

circulation

and

‘disjointed

times’

are offered in the feminine of change in the work of Luce Irigaray. I explore this movement that is perpetually presenting a fluid feminine placed in the “rere” by the Catholic Church but moving to different temporalities of the fore by Irish Catholic mothers and daughters through generations, that negotiate through gestures of defiance and complexities.

Remember to breathe.

This inhabitation of constant movement between Ireland and London, has created an unexpected bodily and psychic unsettledness that has become part of the practice, threading transgenerational trajectories.

I hope to

re-imagine

how these

residues of the states of

bodily,

spatial temporal

and relational unsettledness

of the Irish Catholic maternal are

felt

and reorientated.

The repetition is intentional, as we hold the shared breath.

Rereading Irigaray’s shared air that seeks the potentialities to open to autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality to emerge within these relationships, offers a methodology for this research.

Remember to breathe.

Let’s pause, and listen to these words in our body.

Remember to breathe.

Marie Theresa Crick is a PhD researcher in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research seeks a reorientation of the conditions of Irish Catholic maternal migration of the silent displacement of women from the Republic of Ireland to London in the 1950s, due to premarital pregnancies. Thinking with the women who got married in secret in London and had daughters. Aiming to position a ‘Feminine-to-Come’, a radical within but ‘not yet’, to offer a reorientation of what was transmitted by this migration of another register, the ‘unknown knowns’ of banishment through bodily autonomy and hopes for different futures. Asking what is enabled by a re-imagination of forms of ‘shame’ within mother and daughter relations, to illuminate ‘the livedness’ of the everyday in the Irish Catholic maternal imagination and its futurity. Looking to the potentials for thought, opened by the absences created by the critiques of Irigarayan scholarship. Rereading Irigaray’s motif of air through embraces with filmic breath and practice. Marie Theresa speaks with the polyphony of voices of working-class women from the Irish countryside, framed by conditions of being Irish Catholic in England. The states of bodily, spatial temporal and relational unsettledness of the Irish Catholic maternal, that is fertile and sexual, seek a radical reinvention of the mother and daughter relation, through a rereading of Luce Irigaray’s shared air as it converses with my film and embodied research practice.