Title: Poetics of Filmic Breath: Maternal Air
Year: 2023 to ongoing
Medium: Multi channel experimental film series; (shot and exhibited in 4K); embodied workshop iterations; performance installation
Duration: 2 to 25 minutes (presented in fragments, never in full)
My current practice is anchored in five site-specific spaces:
Rosary Way, Dublin,
Lourdes, France
Fatima, Portugal
Lough Derg, Ireland
A dining room table, Croydon
These four pilgrimage sites and one intimate lived space, form the constellation through which I explore breath, ritual, and maternal relation. The performances at the dining table in Croydon are rooted in the everyday intimacy of care, Irish diaspora in London, and dementia, and are where the practice began. My mother and I return again and again to reading aloud a letter from my late aunt. But it is not the words that remain—it is our breath. These shared breaths, pauses, and silences form the structuring rhythm of all the filmic bodies. They are the pulse that moves the work.
From this ‘private air’, the practice expands outwards to ‘public.’ These moments of shared air; quiet gestures, silences, tensions, and co-breathing, structure not only the internal rhythms of the films but the methodology itself. From this intimate atmosphere, the work begins to expand outward into sites that feature the Virgin Mary, tracing a path shaped by both personal inheritance and embodied longing. This trajectory was initiated by a quiet gesture: my mother handing me the rosary once given to her by her own mother, brought back from a church visit to Lourdes. My body responded with a call to go. I couldn’t articulate why. I just longed to be where my grandmother had once stood, to stay with what lingers in my body that does not originate with me.
This act was not one of pilgrimage in the traditional sense, but a movement toward inhabiting inherited residues, toward understanding how to remain in dialogue not only with my mother, but with my belated grandmother. Through filmic breath, I attempt to navigate and rebody these intergenerational transmissions; making space for their affective weight while also sensing toward what might emerge beyond them.
The Marian sites—Dublin, Lourdes, Fatima, and Lough Derg—serve as filmic thresholds between bodily, spiritual, and historical rhythms. These spaces allow for a different kind of attunement: not to the spectacle of pilgrimage, but to the unnoticed gestures, pauses, and breaths that linger within them. The films made in these places correspond loosely to the Mysteries of the Rosary but resist linear narrative, instead unfolding through non-synchronous time, sensory layering, and bodily pacing.
In embodied workshops, the fragments from each site are projected in relation—to one another, to the room, to those present. Sometimes they play sequentially, other times simultaneously, across walls and thresholds. This structure creates not a fixed narrative but a breathing, dynamic filmic body that responds to the collective energy of each encounter. Each workshop becomes an iteration of the practice; unique, contingent, and co-composed.
I often layer water footage, filmed at these sites, and also in London and Ireland, with the images from the Marian sites. Rather than cutting to clarify, I use match-on-action edits to carry breath across shots. The result is not simply a film, but a filmic body—responsive, unresolved, breathing.
The water too is ‘affected’ by our shared breaths, as we are affected by the water that pulses through the filmic fragments.
Bodily Breath
Filmic Breath
Collide
Poetics of Filmic Breath (Ongoing Series, 2023–2025)
Poetics of Filmic Breath: Iteration III – Sorrowful
Witness to Embodiment
At sites of the Virgin Mary, my practice transforms the witnessing of family history into a living act of embodiment. I journey on pilgrimages to Fatima, Rosary Way, Lourdes, and Lough Derg and even walk el Caminos solo, retracing paths steeped in ancestral affects.
My grandmother once carried a Lourdes rosary, passed to my mother and now to me; each step and breath becomes a gesture to reorientate our transgenerational maternal legacy.
Each step,
Each breath,
becomes a moment of listening,
attuning to both grief and transformation,
reimagining identity
and reclaiming the shared breath of our maternal histories.
***
Filmic Breath, Bodily Breath
The edit becomes an inhalation, a pause, an exhale.
This is what I call filmic breath.
Filmic breath refers to an editing rhythm guided by the body's natural breathing patterns, where cuts and transitions align with inhalations and exhalations, creating a visceral connection between the viewer and the embodied experience on screen.
Poetics of Filmic Breath (Ongoing Series, 2023–2025)
Poetics of Filmic Breath: Iteration I – Joyfulness
Rather than cutting to clarify or explain, I use match-on-action edits to let one gesture extend into the next breath. These edits are bodily, not just visual. Through this method, the edges between the film, bodies and space softens.
What’s projected is not a document but an invitation—
to feel, to breathe, to remember otherwise.
Match-on-action is a film editing technique where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action, creating a seamless flow of movement. In my work, this technique mirrors the continuity or rupture of breath and movement, reinforcing the embodied nature of the narrative.
Poetics of Filmic Breath
Filmic Bodies is not merely a documentation of performance but an invitation to engage with the complexities of memory, transgenerational shame, and the maternal through the visceral language of breath and movement. It stands as a testament to the transformative power of embodied methodologies and the maternal relation.
