More about the project
ON HUNDRED WOUND SITES OR MORE
I am sitting on a high, chrome stool in a black box theatre space. Through the glare of the spotlights I can make out people standing, watching. Ernst Fischer, who also performs in the work, gets up and begins, putting one after another heated glass cups’ on my flesh, covering my back, my front, my legs. There are 22 in total. They feel heavy and pull on my skin; glass and flesh. He leaves them for a few minutes and then returns. Slowly he removes each one, makes a superficial cut in my skin with a scalpel and then replaces it. I watch myself being opened with the scalpel and then the suction of the cup pulling, sucking, and feeding blood out and into itself. I can feel it/me seeping out of me, my beginnings and endings extending and blurring. I see the glasses filling. I feel exposed, raw, and increasingly oscillate between devastation and elation. I can feel energies build up inside me; it begins to feel as though I will barely contain them.
Ernst’s discreet presence makes a final return. As he carefully removes the 22 glass cups so as not to spill the blood I experience a huge release of tension and energy. I am marked with large round purple bruises and clotting blood. A blood print is made of each cut and hung on a taught wire like photographic prints, drying.
Afterwards people don’t say much except some thank me and say it was beautiful. I am not quite certain what this means although I am pleased. I am glad that they can describe their experience — whereas I remain somewhat lost for words, a little traumatised still...
And that is the point: that the action exceeds language. I make these works because words fail me, I cannot put “it” into words, I just have to do it, or be it. Representation fails me because I desire to make work about things that are, perhaps, unrepresentable. So I seek the actual, the real that it is not a translation but an embodiment. A trauma occurs as a wounding, a temporal/spatial relationship in which possibilities can be explored, a rupturing and collapsing of structures, an unmaking. This involves, for me at least, going into the unknown, so that each occasion is remarkable and irreproducible and that is the point.
My practice emerged from a fine art background. It employs performance, and sometimes video and installation with which to consider the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in continuously shifting permutations. The materiality or fabric of the body, as well as the specificity of my actual body, is also important. The relationships between bodily interior/exterior spaces are explored as a continuum. The permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed self’. There is an urge to extend the boundaries of the body, to continue to negate its currencies. The perimeters of the body are questioned and subverted — both its beginnings and endings — to upset and startle how we read and experience it. The body becomes the paradigm as well as the site where the reference points slip and slide; the interplay between public and private becomes confused.
Duration and pushing bodily limits has always been key in my work. Over the last two years the medical has been a primary source of research. In my last three major works I have used old medical bloodletting techniques on myself by way of a bodily utterance or articulation; invoking notions of trauma (a wound) and stigma (a mark) towards an opening of the body suggesting an alterity or otherness. Medical discourse has long dominated a theorising of the body within Western society. Among other things my work questions this exclusivity.
Working with the methodology of my actual, experienced physical self means my practice is very much process-orientated; the perfor-mance being a moment of existing within that framework. The consequences of the action go on long before — and long after — the viewers are present. A palimpsest of tiny scars in varying stages of disappearance is being established on my body from each successive performance. They both document a history of the work and are, indeed, part of the work, collapsing the differences between making and performing.
The work simultaneously recognises and resists the signification of the (specifically female) body and investigates the dynamics of looking. The audience become complicit in this by undertaking their own process of confirmation and denial of what they are seeing. As the work is often explicit and sometimes uncomfortable it seeks to question rather than provide easy answers. By asking the audience to take a risk with me a sense of intimacy is established, creating a direct and immediate dialogue. They become collaborators; com-plicit from the moment they make the decision to be there. Each performance feels like some kind of contract between the audience, and myself clearly negotiated by each party.
The visual considerations of my work tend to be formal, economical and precise. Its minimalist sculptural approach both informs, and provides a framework with which to view the work. I have shown in traditional galleries and non-art spaces including domestic ones, questioning how meaning is altered through a shifting of context and the ways in which the boundaries between the public and the private are blurred. My work utilises conventions — recognisable systems of looking and mediating art in the hope that the action can rupture that fabric of those systems.
Kira O’Reilly
A part of the text that was originally published in UK arts magazine AN in April 2001.
