From the Inside Out, and the Outside In… reflects on the realities of island life that are often obscured by romanticised notions of islands. While islands are often perceived as safe havens for those escaping the hustle and bustle of mainland urban lives, for island dwellers, the experience extends far beyond the safety net that comes with being enclosed by the sea. Importantly within this context, isolation, which is typically associated with vulnerability or a lack of safety, is translated into strength through preparation, communication, and exchange.

Through an assemblage of mediums: sculpture, performance art (video), and drawings, From the Inside Out and the Outside In, represent the strength of island networks at a time of extreme social isolation and fragmentation. It seeks to draw out the tension between transparency and opacity that has historically structured mainland/island relations, capturing the ebb and flow of its journeys on its way.

Reminiscent of my feelings and experiences upon first moving to Bere Island, these works are shaped by my understanding of island life as simultaneously defined by openness and limitations, community and autonomy, roots and routes.

Fishing and foraging are long-standing traditions of island people, passed down from generation to generation as a means to make money, bring food to the table and for enjoyment.

The reliance of island people on nature and the sea often saw island women take on additional roles to their mainland counterparts.

As part of the body of work, ‘From the Inside Out and the Outside In,’ the video performance, entitled The Fine Line depicts the resilient work of island women that is often unnoticed.

An island can be both paradise and prison, both heaven and hell. An island is a contradiction between openness and closure, between roots and routes, which islanders must continually negotiate (Godfrey Baldacchino, 2007)

From September 2020 until June 2022, a group of twenty-four women, full-time residents of Bere Island, came together virtually, to reflect on the challenges of Island life at a time of extreme social isolation. For islanders, the experience of isolation has a long and complicated history. Within the ideological frame of western modernisation, it is often assumed that Islandness equates to isolation. This assumption was often aligned with other exclusionary characteristics, such as the ‘peripheral’, or ‘backward’, each of which, places the Island outside of time, and outside of history. On the other side of this picture, the island is also celebrated and valorised as a place of escape, to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the masses, the pollution, a place of unreconstructed, natural beauty. In recent times, these binary representations have begun to fade and become less distinctive. Due largely to the experience of climate change, islands and island life are being reconsidered and repositioned as important spaces to think about how we live together in a world that is increasingly dis-placing the human being as its central agent. Within this context, other binaries are also being troubled, between scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge, land and the sea, male and female.

These tensions are captured in the durational project the hold, which simultaneously names the warm loving embrace of island relations and the constricting, confining experience of island life for women. Navigating these contradictions the Hold prioritises the flow of shared, lived knowledge between island women. Through the lens of quilt making, performance, written word, sound, and photography, the women reflect on the hold that the island has had over them, and the confinements and challenges they face on a daily basis. Each thought-provoking story reflects on the importance of place, and the experience of dis-placement within it. The viewer is invited to be a part of these stories and the unique insights they provide into island life, during a global pandemic.

In January of this year, Italian philosopher Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi penned an unusual little book titled Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (2019). Tying together fragments of hope and despair, from Occupy Wall Street to Eric Garners gasping last words, Berardi reflects on the contemporary chaos of our ailing respiratory passages.  Warning of further political and environmental blockages to come, ‘breathing’ becomes a potent signifier of an increasingly precarious world. 

A similar sentiment is captured by Breathe, which Interrogates our contemporary anxieties through a series of new works installed in the underground rooms of an ex-artillery shelter on Beara Island. Passing through lung-like tunnels of the artillery shelter the viewer is confronted by coded messages in bright neon that tap into our fragile industrial complexes. Morse-code performances installed in several rooms attempt to ‘work through’ our struggles, to express the frustrations and frantic nature of our everyday lives. Such gestures are repeated throughout the exhibition, promising relief but remaining unresolved, tense, troubled. As Giorgio Agamben has suggested, gestures express what is being "endured and supported" when language fails, that is, "gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term" (Agamben, 1996,p.58). Having no instrumental value and no goal, the gesture aims only to support and mediate the character of 'corporeal movement'. Framed by the stale air of the underground tunnels, breathe exhibits a 'corporeal' struggle with the incommunicability of life's pressures, a performance of endurance that can only be captured in gesture, the most elemental gesture of them all, breathing

“For the last year, I have been developing a series of research projects and performances in different abandoned military sites on Bere Island. These sites are potent reminders of our colonial history and the types of political regimes that have existed on this island. My work aims to subvert these historical and political sites to speak to more gendered forms of colonisation and regimentation. Paralleling the domestic and the military, the work draws out the repetitive nature of domestic chores with the drill and precision of military discipline. Attending to the function of dressage, I seek to highlight the subtle performativity of uniform in the classification of roles and sensibilities in society. The performance of gender, identity and in/equality is investigated through different contexts and media to address the physiological and psychological tensions between the bodies we inherit and the head spaces we inhabit.”

A work in progress.

An island is a safe haven of total peace. However, in every safe haven there can be turmoil. The stones in the landscape symbolise this turmoil. Stones can be used to build boundaries and dividers. Each are different in shape, size and weight, but all can come together to form a powerful barrier between humankind, or metaphorically, between happiness and sadness. Although stones can trap bodies in darkness, all it takes is one sliver of light to see hope.

An exploration of the subtle monotony of maintenance work, which often creates a sense of claustrophobia similar to the sensation of drowning.

The head is like a vessel, containing all elements of emotional disorders affecting everyone, each in a different way. There is no stigma attached to the word ‘head’ and therefore people can use the word more freely without being labelled. This project explores the concept of mental health through the discussion of the word ‘head’.

I am interested in rethinking the idea of materials and how they matter, signify and how they communicate. I don’t want them to symbolise, illustrate or represent something else. It is more a sensibility. I want the objects to speak on their own terms.