The Body Electric, 2021, The Model, Sligo
Taking Walt Whitman’s iconic poetic celebration of the human being as its title and its point of departure, this exhibition explores the human form, embodiment and the lived experience through key works in The Niland Collection. The idea of ekphrasis underpins The Body Electric and it is this ancient technique of creating, writing and making that is at the heart of the exhibition, transgressing the world of art, the para-normal and the lived experience.
The project features work by a multitude of artists and writers including Claire-Louise Bennett, Tara Bergin, Dorothy Cross, Clodagh Emoe, Leontia Flynn, Marie Foley, Alice Lyons, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Rosie O’Reilly, George (AE) Russell, Jessica Traynor, Suzanne Walsh, John Butler Yeats and many others
For the exhibition I responded to two artworks. The first was We Are and We Are Not by Clodagh Emoe adn the Second Work I responded to was The Táin. The Morrígan in bird shape is a 1969 work by Louis le Brocquy.
WE ARE AND ARE NOT:
Using speculative narration as a tool I developed a conversation between The Covid 19 Virus and the art work We Are And Are Not by Clodagh Emoe. I payed the artwork and Dr. Fred Cummings UCD played the virus. The goal was to use this work to ask what making participatory art means while experiencing a global pandemic.
The work gives voice to the virus and speculates about its origin in the face of biodiversity loss and the greater implications for the human body.
Listen to the work here
The Second Work I responded to was The Táin. The Morrígan in bird shape is a 1969 work by Louis le Brocquy. This written work explores the more than human, the feral and the animism inherent in an understanding of place.
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The Morrígan
(i)
I saw the bird in the mouth of a beast,
it fell from his tight jaws and slumped in the clay before me.
Then it rose again, shaking the dust off its oily wings
and I knew it was The Morrígan.
The great queen.
She’s been before in other forms,
tripartite of rebirth, death and fertility.
Now she’s here as a crow with a twisted nose
that sits scratching at the rust.
A shape shifter in a dark cloak,
here to warn me of doom?
The beast had fled,
it was a howling wind with snarling teeth
that had brought The Morrígan to me.
A wild winter beast,
though this day had just sprung from spring.
The Morrígan’s twisted beak rose,
an eye was shown, her feathers fell.
And I mount the great queen to soar.
(ii)
We rise from the clay pit, feathered and skinned.
Dust and acid we leave behind,
surging storms and fires keep blazing.
Floods and lights and lights, dark and dark.
A virus caught in a world with us,
an octopus wanders canals deep in Venice.
two panda’s in a Beijing zoo,
mating only when the thousand human eyes looked away.
The long year. Masked and unmasked, truths and untruths.
Death and life.
And on we soar.
I’m still in her feather bed,
the corvid shape embedded deep,
these oily creatures have made paths in dust
and scratched at rust,
for a longer time than we have stood bipedal,
shape shifting between our world and hers.
Aside the storyteller.
She who soared and cawed so the great bull of Maebd could flee,
abreast to caw when we can no longer see.
But stories of the hero have all but pushed these tales away,
with sword and stick in hand ensuring tales of us and crow
were beaten till the marks in clay,
where we scrapped together for ants were gone.
Eroded like those places by the sea
where we sat and watched with wonder as the great dark corvid soared,
shell in beak to drop and crack her final meal.
(iii)
The beast returns.
A howling wind is heard,
and storm and rain licks her away.
The spring day with winter in its belly continues now.
To the pit I go,
I shift my shape, I unfold.
I scratch and scrap for ants
and forage mussels for a meal.
I build a nest,
twig on twig, clay on clay.
A new home for me and mine, both our kind and theres.
and I listen for the caw of The Morrígan