In Brief
This page gathers temporal, recorded, and site-responsive performances that are central to my practice. Working with body, voice, breath, film, gesture, and ritual objects, these performances explore maternal memory, inherited silence, Irish diasporic experience, and the ways histories are carried through the body.
Some performances happen privately, in domestic spaces. Others take place in public, institutional, or pilgrimage sites. Some become film. Others become the starting point for workshops, circular readings, and shared listening.
Rather than performing a fixed story, I work with fragments: a letter, a rosary, an engagement ring, a breath, a pause, a repeated gesture. These materials hold traces of family, migration, care, shame, love, and loss, without needing to explain everything they contain.
The performances ask how breath might become a way of staying with what is difficult to speak.
Objects, Breath, Gesture
My body and psyche move with inherited objects:
my grandmother’s engagement ring,
her rosary,
a letter passed between women,
film fragments,
breath,
silence,
and the spaces where these materials are held.
These objects are not treated as evidence, but as companions. They are carried, touched, read, filmed, worn, and returned to. Through repetition, they become ways of listening to what remains unresolved.
Performance as Repetition and Return
The performances repeatedly return to gestures shaped by Irish Catholicism, family memory, maternal relation, and institutional histories. They move between reading, breath, touch, walking, filming, and pausing.
Repetition is important. It disorients and reorients. It allows something to be approached slowly, from different angles, without forcing it to become clear.
Each iteration asks:
What happens when a memory is breathed again?
What happens when a letter is read aloud?
What happens when the body carries what language cannot fully hold?
What changes when a private gesture enters public air?
Reconfiguring Embodied Memory Through Practice
My performance practice moves through four interrelated forms of air:
Private Air
Private Air begins in intimate spaces: at tables, in rooms, through quiet readings, gestures, and conversations. These performances attend to breath, care, memory, and the emotional textures that gather between two people.
They are not staged for an audience in a conventional sense. They begin as encounters: fragile, partial, sometimes tender, sometimes difficult. The work asks how private memory is held in the body, and how inherited silence might be approached without demanding exposure.
Public Air
Public Air carries the voice into communal, ritual, or institutional spaces. These performances often take place in sites shaped by Catholic imagery, pilgrimage, devotion, or public memory.
Reading aloud in these spaces opens a tension between what is visible and what remains unheard. The voice moves through architecture, atmosphere, and history. Breath becomes a way of asking who is allowed to speak, who is listened to, and what forms of maternal experience have been silenced.
Filmic Bodies
Filmic Bodies emerge from performances recorded through handheld video, digital film, photography, and sound. These works are edited through breath: inhale, pause, exhale, hesitation.
The cut follows the body. The image breathes. Movement, silence, and rhythm become part of the film’s structure.
Rather than documenting performance as something finished, the films become another body of the work — carrying breath across different sites, times, and geographies.
Embodied Circular Readings
Embodied Circular Readings bring performance into shared space with others. Autobiographical fragments, poetic writing, archival traces, and filmic material are read aloud, moved with, listened to, and held collectively.
Participants are invited to engage gently: through voice, breath, silence, stillness, writing, or movement. There is no demand to disclose or perform. The reading becomes a temporary circle of attention where difficult histories can be approached with care.
From Performance to Workshop
These performances often become the ground for listening and reading groups, embodied workshops, film screenings, and participatory installations. A private gesture may become a film fragment. A film fragment may become a workshop prompt. A reading may become a shared archive.
The work unfolds durationally across artist residencies, community settings, academic spaces, pilgrimage sites, and online gatherings. It does not seek resolution. Instead, it creates conditions for listening, staying, breathing, and returning.
Through performance, I ask how the body might remember otherwise — and how shared air might open space for relation, care, and transformation.
Poetic Fragments
Alongside the performances, I write short poetic fragments, notes, scores, and breath-texts that move through the wider practice. These fragments often emerge from the same conditions as the performances: breath, illness, travel, maternal memory, water, weather, and shared air.
They are not separate writings, but part of the performance ecology. They become scripts, voiceovers, workshop prompts, subtitles, readings, and traces within filmic, sonic, and living archival works.
Closing Line
Breath becomes a way of listening to what has not yet found language.
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