I am a Dublin-based artist making work engaging with personal family history through the medium of video. My work combines archival materials with dialogue and footage made in response to the materials, creating a recombinant narrative that questions what we take for granted in history and the archive. I work with and against the archive, utilising critical theory and fabulation to enable autonomy and a voice to be given to women who were not granted this in their own time. I approach what I’ve learned in my research with nuance, and my practice as an artist allows for productive and emboldened speculation surrounding the more personal aspect of the lives I investigate.
I Pluck Myself To Bleed So That I Might Feed You
I work within the medium of video, engaging with the silences and limitations of the archive in relation to women’s histories. Using feminist readings of archival material and critical fabulation as a methodology, I construct counter-histories that reframe female autonomy beyond official records.
This project examines my family history through scans of The Longford Leader from the 1930s documenting my great-grandmother’s divorce, alongside digitally scanned 8mm tapes from my childhood that my estranged father was granted access to during my mother’s divorce proceedings without my consent. I combine these materials with contemporary recordings to create an anachronistic narrative surrounding my great-grandmother’s arranged marriage and divorce.
Narrated through a letter addressed to my great-grandmother and conversations with my mother, the work intertwines lived experience with speculative reconstruction. Presented as a single-channel video with headphones, the project explores intergenerational shame, memory, and the recovery of female autonomy across four generations.
