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I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community living in the 21st century. I have some questions about the idea of identity and sexuality. My practice uses performance, sculpture, video, sound, photography and site specificity to create a body of work responds to the question “When did my sexuality become my identity?”

The fetishisation of the word “lesbian” has become problematic for me. With the label I have given myself, I have now to live to a certain standard that corresponds to the word lesbian. There are many questions surrounding my sexual identity that I cannot answer but one thing I am certain of is that sexuality is fluid.

While researching the topic of sexuality I looked at texts that questioned the ideas around queer identity such as Gender is Burning by Judith Butler. In the text she discusses the fetishisation of lesbians and how heterosexual discrimination regards them as faking their sexuality because they hate men. Movies such as “Paris is burning” displays how the LGBTQ+ community can become like a family but can also be toxic in their ideas of gender and social norms.

An artist that has really inspired my work is Sarah Lucas. My work “fluid” was heavily inspired by her use of taboos and strong imagery of sexuality in her work. Taking back the use of bodies and nudity in work doesn't necessarily imply sexualisation.

My work is about being vulnerable and tries to break the taboos around sex and identity. It tries to break the social norms around lesbians, labels and how sexuality is on display.

I used sound in my work to create an emotion and a heightened sense of being in a private space. Using cardboard as a material was manageable and easy to manipulate or change, much like the idea of sexuality. By hanging figures of the body from the ceiling “adult crib” these objects became like a child’s mobile. Using my own body as a medium to create work, I revealed my vulnerability while taking back the use of a woman's body in artworks. Inspired by artists like the Guerilla Girls, I wanted to use my body as a powerful way to protest against the sexualisation of a woman's body even when it's not in a sexual position. Nudity is natural much like the need for affection or sexuality.

Lines have been crossed and hard discussions have been had. But one thing I know for certain is sexuality is fluid and there's no need to put yourself in fixed categories to please other people.

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A3 Chalk on black

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a3 chalk on black paper

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a3 chalk on black paper

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A triptych series based on a animation that I have made. melt is a reference to how I visualized my body. the faces take shapes of vaginas in reference to sexuality and how Out of place you can feel when coming to terms with your sexuality. The word fluid comes to mind while looking at these.

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this is a collection of videos and artist research.

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reading that i found helpful when resurching my ideas

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Most made with photo shop but all made this year.

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this colum is a starting point for my ideas and works that i have created over this semester. i have made videos and voice recordings of my self to talk about ideas that i have had.

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Adult crib is a collection of 13 cardboard cut outs that is based around the idea of sexuality. It is collection of underwear, breasts, chest areas and hands. It is an installation piece that was placed in the bedroom because of the asscoation of sexuality. It resbles a moble to create an immersive space. The conscept behind the work was the idea of how your  home life has become public. that a place of rest becomes topic of coverstion.

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the idea of a family dynimic and eithcs in showing that work

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It is just about 30 years since Richard Billingham picked up a camera and focused it on his alcoholic father, Ray, and his violent mother, Liz, and the Black Country council flat in which they lived. The pictures were intended as studies for paintings, but they took on a life of their own. A tutor on Billingham's art degree course at Sunderland University came across the photographs in a plastic bag and Billingham ended up displaying them in all their flash-lit squalor: toothless and shirtless Ray cradling pop bottles of home brew; Liz, with her lavishly tattooed slabs of arms and vast floral print frocks, lost in her jigsaw puzzles or TV dinners. Taken together - "Ray's a Laugh" is what Billingham called them - they seemed to provide a tragicomic through-the-keyhole of degraded post-Thatcherite Britain. Charles Saatchi included Billingham's work in his 1997 Sensation show, alongside Damien Hirst's shark and Tracey Emin's tent.

Up until their premature deaths about a decade later, Billingham's parents were mostly oblivious to the fact that they had generated a Turner prize nomination and global gallery fame. Billingham, however, who made his reputation as an art photographer on the rawness of those pictures, still felt he had unfinished business with them and with his adolescence. The result of that is , a feature film he has written and directed that breathes claustrophobic life back into the original stills. In advance of release, it was shortlisted as an outstanding debut by Bafta and won the same category at the British independent film awards.

When he was setting out on the journey to make the film nearly three years ago, I spent a day with Billingham in the streets around Cradley Heath, west of Birmingham, where he grew up. We went up to the 14th floor of the refurbished former council block where the film was partly shot, with its carefully reconstructed 1970s peeling wallpaper and cigarette fug. At the time Billingham, along with his indefatigable producer Jacqui Davies, was launching a Kickstarter campaign to try to get the film off the ground. In the event, that campaign raised around £20,000 - plus a good deal of crucial awareness - toward a final begged and borrowed budget of £700,000 or so.

Billingham sat back then in a local cafe along with Deidre Kelly ("White Dee" of the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street, who plays the older Liz in the film) and talked, in his halting, introspective way, about how he envisaged the movie as "a triptych", of three intense fragments of childhood memory. That is how it has turned out. In the first part of the film we watch the older Ray (played by Patrick Romer) around the time Billingham made his photos, trapped in his bedroom, uncertain whether it is day or night, taking delivery of his plastic bottles of booze from a friend and slowly draining them, shouting out to the estranged Liz through the flat window.

The second part of the movie shifts back to when Billingham was about 10 and the family's problems first spiralled after Ray lost his job as a factory machinist, and was conned out of his few grand of redundancy money. That memory involves an incident with Billingham's childlike Uncle Lol, who is left in charge of Richard's baby brother Jason, events that reveal Liz (played brilliantly as a younger woman by Ella Smith) in all her destructive rage.

The third part of the film focuses on the days before Jason, then seven or eight, was taken into foster care having spent a winter night in a garden shed far from home without Ray or Liz even noticing he was missing. Those shorthand descriptions are about all the action in Billingham's film, but they do not begin to explain the layers of complex neglect (and frequent brutal human comedy) that are re-examined.

Billingham is, in person, both protective of that past and in some ways dismissive of its impacts. He has found ways, if not of processing it, then at least of framing it. He doesn't blame his parents. Things could have turned out worse. As he said to me last week, looking back on it from his home in Swansea: "Jason often says to me now that, statistically, we should either be in prison or dead or homeless."

People on the streets have a social life parallel to ours, but separate. You glimpse how they see us, from low down

That they aren't, Billingham puts down to two things: elements of luck, and the fact that both he and his brother had "a love of nature" gleaned from watching David Attenborough documentaries and nurtured by annual childhood visits with Liz to Dudley Zoo, the highlight of his year. These outings, he believes, looking back, gave both him and his brother - who kept a box of pet snails under his bed - a way of seeing; a sense that the alcoholic chaos of family, caged and confined in its four walls, was not all the world.

In some ways, I suggested to Billingham, the finished film shifts the emotional heart of his pictures away from Ray and Liz and on to Jason, who experienced the worst fallout of their dereliction. Billingham depicts himself as numbed and helpless in protecting his brother. He smiles at my suggestion that the film is a fraternal love letter, but concedes that certainly those were the hardest parts for him to reimagine. Was a misplaced guilt at not having done more for his brother one of the motivations for needing to explain that past to himself again?

"Well, I had to look after myself, I suppose," he says, after a pause. "And it's the parents' job, isn't it, to look after the little one?"

He carefully reconstructed some of his brother's memories - "how did that smell?", "what did that look like to you?" - from a series of conversations with him. It was important to Billingham not to make it a film about his own experiences; he was afraid that might come over as self-indulgent. "Also, I am present in that I wrote it and directed it. I am there anyway."

Jason still lives in Birmingham, where he works as a road-drainage surveyor, mapping motorway puddles (and "probably earning more than me," Billingham says). I wondered what he had made of the film?

"I showed it to him on a link early on, and he said it was just how he remembered it. And there was a screening at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham and he came with a dozen people, friends. Jason was laughing at it mostly. But the other people he came with were all in tears. He was very impressed that it was nominated in the Baftas, which was something my mother used to watch, I think, and he liked the fact that his story might be part of that, that something seemingly very small can become something important."

Do they talk about Ray and Liz much?

"A little bit. But I probably only see him once or twice a year, and we never talk on the phone."

Billingham has three children of his own, the oldest 12. He has settled in Swansea, his wife's home city, though you get the sense he still carries those Black Country landscapes around with him in his head. His camera in Ray & Liz dwells with rapt attention on the few objects around which his childhood closeups cohered: the cassette recorder he used to make recordings both of the top 40 and of family rows (some of which he had kept and played back to the cast); the fake-flame electric fires he stared into.

There is an unfolding slowness to moments of childhood that the film captures exactly.

"Back then you might spend half an hour studying the back of a chair," he says. "We shot it on film because we wanted to evoke that period. But I realise now that film renders that world better than digital. It's great for capturing more natural materials - paper, wood, or cotton or wool."

In recent months Billingham has been making photographs of rough sleepers near where he lives in Swansea. He finds that a digital camera is better for those portraits. "The homeless people I meet wear a lot of kind of mountain clothing and it is very synthetic," he says. "They will have a Costa coffee cup, or a pre-packed sandwich that someone has given them, and the digital camera can render those modern surfaces and plastics really well. But the film camera is much better for older surfaces."

What has led him to do the homeless pictures?

"I was interested by how the people on the streets have their own social life that runs in parallel to ours, but completely separate," he says. "I get talking to them and you get a glimpse of the way they see us, from low down. Like a child's perspective."

Do they feel like kindred spirits, in that sense, observers of an estranging world?

He has been struck more by how easily, as a naturally shy person, he can fall into conversation with them. "It goes back to living in the tower block in my teenage years, when there was always the threat of sudden violence," he says. "You had to talk to people in a certain way, empathetic, non-threatening, to avoid that, and I find myself doing that with the people I meet on the streets. They always say go ahead when I ask if I can make a picture of them."

The other grim parallel he finds with the 1970s and 80s is the way that a kind of emblematic hopelessness has returned in those lives. "I watched that film I, Daniel Blake, that was a very good summary of it, it seemed to me. How Britain is today." It reminded him in particular of how his parents were at the mercy of circumstances because they couldn't fill in forms or make effective phone calls - Liz makes fruitless journeys in the film out to the payphone on the corner, with her pile of 2p pieces, to try to trace what happened to the money they lost. The internet has not made such a predicament any easier.

"The best thing you can do is talk to homeless people, to remind them they are not ignored," Billingham says. "That or give them a cigarette. I watch them always scratching around in bins to make roll-ups. I watched one guy pulling stubs out of drains, then drying them out."

Ray was himself a master of such scavenging. The kitchen window sill in the film contains a jar of nub-ends that Billingham's father used to go out on night walks to find.

"He used to tell me that, as a teenager, you would stand next to someone who was smoking and wait, and when they dropped their fag you would pick it up," he says. "I think he carried on from that."

Those excursions were one of the few ways that Ray made sense of time. There is no shape to the days of the film, except that provided by the arrival of drink and the consequence of hangover. Billingham has watched some Samuel Beckett over the years, but he knew the atmosphere of those plays first-hand.

"Ray and Liz never woke up at a certain time or got up and had breakfast," he says. "Their time was elliptical and messy, and I wanted the film to reflect that."

Does he crave structure as a result in his own days?

"I have three kids so I don't have much choice," he says. "But I have a diary that I couldn't live without. I think I always tried to keep a diary as a kid - I do like structured time."

I wonder if his children have seen the film (they have walk-on parts), but he says they are too young, and not bothered about that past anyway.

When I spoke to him before, he said he hoped he might reach that state of diffidence himself. It's one of the reasons, he says now, that he wanted the detail of the rooms and the characters to be so precisely accurate. To get it all out of his head.

Of the process, he explains how he did a lot of rehearsals with the actors so they could capture the movements of Ray and Liz at different moments, just as he remembered them. "Things like how they walked or stood or shuffled into a room." He wanted it to feel uncanny, and it did, by the end. "When Ella was playing Liz, after a while, she just did it, with nothing from me, the facial expressions, the way she held a cigarette..."

Billingham now holds visiting professorship in photography at Gloucester and Middlesex universities. He describes himself as "mostly a landscape photographer". He hopes the Bafta nomination will open up some new avenues for him to make other features over the coming years. He has a few ideas for treatments and is writing them now.

I wonder if Ray & Liz has worked in the way he hoped, that it is his final word on the subject?

He insists it is. "I want to make other things," he says. "It's funny, it's Jason now who keeps telling me I should do more about that past. He mentions other events about that life that would make a film." But Billingham is not convinced. He's 48 now, and he believes there are other stories out there to tell. As he begins to describe them, though, I wonder if it is quite so easy to escape from the one that made you a storyteller.
Ray & Liz is in cinemas from 8 March

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Richard Billingham: 'Statistically, I should be in prison, dead or homeless'

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The photographer made his name with a series showing his dysfunctional parents, Ray and Liz, in their squalid Black Country flat. Now he's turned their story into an award-winning film

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the placement of there work being off the floor i find really intresting

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diffrent lighting that didnt make the cut

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Natural gestures is a video performance of two hands exploring space.  Natural gestures spreaks about how touch and being affectionate is very natural way to communicate. How wanting that affection is natural. This was performed with a women who idenifys as bi sexeual and myself, who idenifys as a lesbian. The emotions of the piece lies in the music and the rising of the spetrem of colours.

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made in photoshop, this idea of how fluid things can be.

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https://youtu.be/wB_6Z-uUAbM

new media helped make this.

a comment on "airing out your dirty laundry" ref to sexualty.

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https://youtu.be/JHpaTIXHF1Y

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We are delighted to present the seventh iteration of our screening series with a work by .

Working across film, installation and performance, Weir explores how lived experiences relate to conceptual knowledge and theory. Her works habitually consider the act of making and the mediums in which they are made, creating a dialogue between the nature of ideas and the way in which thinking is materialised. Her fascinating 2015 essay film, A Reflection on Light, interlaces those concepts through an exploration of time mediated through a Cubist painting by Mainie Jellett and the multiple crossover relationships between memory and record, and history and the present.

A Reflection on Light was the outcome of a research project that began during Weir's tenure as Artist-In-Residence in Trinity College Dublin during 2012, a three month artist residency which evolved into three years of research, development and close collaboration with TCD's School of Physics that culminated with the film's premier at Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of Grace Weir's solo exhibition 3 Different Nights, recurring in 2015.

A Reflection on Light travels across three different locations and histories: the interior of Jellett's apartment, a gallery space at IMMA, and finally the department of Physics at Trinity College, where the main protagonist of the film, Jellett's painting hangs.

In order to weave together the different strands of time and space, Weir created a film that consists of a seemingly single shot that visually connects locations. This illusion, created by the technical challenge of the continuous camera shot, confronts the issue of time, and of the illusion of linear time dictated by the sequential nature of images in film. Exploring the act of making, this technical gambit serves equally as an illusion as well as an exploration of the paradoxically unique but repeatable nature of time. The visual linearity of film generates a sense of continuity that is juxtaposed by the film's intimate voiceover by Weir addressing the multiple natures of time by traversing different fields and disciplines to present a wider context to the concerns of Jellett's painting.

Grace Weir is concerned with aligning a lived experience of the world with conceptual knowledge and theory. Her works unfold trajectories of thought in particular where matters of definition and temporality coalesce. Creating a dialogue between the nature of ideas and the ways in which thinking is materialised, the works frequently refer to the act of making and the mediums in which they are made, including where time itself forms the work.

One particular area of Weir's work is her unique approach to research; based on specific encounters with objects, archives, and locations or conversations with scientists, philosophers, and practitioners from other disciplines. Weir probes the nature of a fixed identity, the relationship between reality and representation, memory and record, history and the present, underpinned by the theories and entities under her scrutiny, whether scientific, philosophical or cultural. The resulting work ranges from cinematic works and installations to experimental videos, lecture-performances and web projects.

Grace Weir studied at the National College of Art and Design, followed by a M.Sc in Interactive Digital Media at Trinity College, Dublin. She represented Ireland at the 49th International Venice Biennale in 2001. Solo exhibitions include , at The Gallery at the Institute of Physics, London (2019), at Laure Genillard, London (2017) and 3 different nights, recurring, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2015). Selected exhibitions include Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Finland (2019); Mahler and LeWitt Studios, Spoleto, Italy (2018); The Glucksman, Cork (2018); Artspace Boan 1942, Seoul (2017); Hessel Museum, Bard, New York (2016); De León, Bath, UK (2016); PLATO video06, Czech Republic (2016); Science Gallery, Dublin (2013); Gracelands, EVA International, Limerick (2012); Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2011); Dublin City Gal-lery, The Hugh Lane (2009); BAMOIC, Beijing (2008); The Science Museum, London (2007); Temporarycontemporary, London, UK (2005); Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2003). She was Artist-in-Residence at St. John's College, Oxford in 2007 and at Trinity College Dublin in 2012.

Double Slo-mo, Quantum Zeno by Francis McKee, published in3 different nights, recurring , IMMA, Dublin.

Out of Darkness by Sam Thorne, published in 3 different nights, recurring, IMMA, Dublin.

Taking time and making space by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, published in 3 different nights, recurring, IMMA, Dublin.

Grace Weir in conversation with Rachael Thomas, published in 3 different nights, recurring, IMMA, Dublin.

Grace Weir by Isobel Harbison, Frieze, Issue 178, January 2016.

ArtForum Critic's Picks by Kylie Gilchrist, ArtForum, October 2017.

Weir science: a stellar artistic voyage that poses big questions by Gemma Tipton, The Irish Times, 21 January 2016.

Grace Weir: 'I often think through the camera' by Henry Broome, Studio International, October 2017.

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Grace Weir Screening - THE DOUGLAS HYDE GALLERY

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We are delighted to present the seventh iteration of our screening series with a work by . Working across film, installation and performance, Weir explores how lived experiences relate to conceptual knowledge and theory. Her works habitually consider the act of making and the mediums in which they are made, creating a dialogue between the nature of ideas and the way in which thinking is materialised.

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the walk home from the night before. No one can tell only the nabours

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the use of the body and how it has be minuplated tp be exaturated

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Point de Gaze, Chapter 23, 2011

Silkscreen ink and gesso on panel

32 2/5 × 20 × 7/10 in

82.2 × 50.8 × 1.9 cm

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R.H. Quaytman's work follows a few cardinal rules: pieces are conceived in series, each series must relate to the site where it was first exhibited, and new works relate directly to the series that preceded it. This emphasis on continuity in Quaytman's practice imbues her works with a narrative trajectory-it is fitting that she titles her series "Chapters." The subjects in her works hail from a variety of sources, which have included art history, scientific archives, and personal or family history. Though the production of an individual work might require techniques and media related to silk-screening, photography, and sculpture, Quaytman claims to always have painting on her mind: "I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting's absolute presence," she has said.

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R. H. Quaytman | Point de Gaze, Chapter 23 (2011) | Artsy

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R.H. Quaytman's work follows a few cardinal rules: pieces are conceived in series, each series must relate to the site where it was first exhibited, and new works relate directly to the series that preceded it. This emphasis on continuity in Quaytman's practice imbues her works with a narrative trajectory-it is fitting that she titles her series "Chapters."

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Untitled (Martha Rosler Collage), 2001-2002

Collage

22 4/5 × 49 2/5 in

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Empathicalism, 2010

Found metal, steel, concrete

61 × 17 9/10 × 17 9/10 in

155 × 45.5 × 45.5 cm

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Vague Pur Affection, 2012

Wood and steel shelves, paper, brass, concrete, and acrylic

85 × 35 1/2 × 16 in

215.9 × 90.2 × 40.6 cm

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"Holly Hendry’s site-responsive sculptures and installations are concerned with what lives beneath the surface, from hidden underground spaces to the interior workings of the body. Casting is central to the artist’s process in which she uses an array of materials, including steel, jesmonite, silicone, ash, charcoal, lipstick, soap, foam, marble, aluminium and grit."

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keep Coffin

2019

Plaster, perspex, wood, hoover dust.

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keep Coffin

2019

Plaster, perspex, wood, hoover dust.

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im still reading but the ideas of punk culture could be a touch stone for future project

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a start to the final piece

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an idea form melt, a trpitic

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How the water changes the shape and form of the carboard

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Pieces on the line

my first ideas fo the final piece as a profamance. i want to add othere mand made objects and natural object. im going to try this in my room to see how it chnages the meaning

im happy with how these turned out.

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The body is more than a body, it’s dimensional and complex

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my thoughts and ideas on my carboard figures.

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Cardboard

a throwaway item that is easy to cut into and take part.

easy to manipulate.

when wet it disintegrates.

not built to last.

easy to move.

and associated memories of moving.

Pins

sharp and cold,

can cause pain or sensation.

holding pieces together.

Hard to brake.

Gestures that are made from Cardboard, that can be quite personal too one person rather than another. The Cardboard comes from boxes that are Flat and the pins are old sewing needles that works together to hold theses pieces in place. how will the carboard hold when there Wet or left out in the elements for a long period time. Will the gesture stay or morph into a mush of Cardboard?

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im not mad on how these turned out.. back to the drawing board

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Love in Technicolour - A Film by Kojaque

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College time

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lock down 2020. What i need and have to use. With college, self care and diy that has been done so far.

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shower, work, home, bed.

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life of a front line worker durning covid lock down 2020.

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based in free the nipple campain, this protest script to ehy free the nipple should be a be at the frounts of everyones mind. women shouldnt be sexulzed for there bodys that they share the same with males.

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interative project:

give people objects, clothing, paint, markers ect and let the create work on my body around the thoughts of lesbains and sexualty. they can add subtract or errace any thing while i stand still and record in a still shot form.

the finalproduct would be 0placed into a grid like Cassils work of his body building

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instead of using my body in a proformance how can i use shadows or objects to create a profance peice that could be my final peice.

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instalation peice that i can make in my room if possable to create a washing line and hang figures form that.
recoard that making process.

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Debating what it means to be gay after a European ruling that the law in Ireland making homosexual acts criminal must be changed.

Following a lengthy campaign by Senator David Norris and the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, it was found that Irish laws prohibiting homosexual activities were in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. The findings now mean that the Irish government must change the law which makes homosexual acts criminal.

Stephen Lewis describes his experience living as a homosexual man in Ireland at a time when homosexuals were viewed under the law as criminals. For Stephen, Ireland has a problem in dealing with sexuality in general and being gay makes it twice as hard to feel accepted in society. He feels he and others like him are treated as second-class citizens and that the current law is shameful.

Ireland is a difficult place to be gay in.

In studio, academic and gay rights campaigner Senator David Norris argues his case against Fine Gael TD Brendan McGahon who is opposed to decriminalisation.

Brendan McGahon describes homosexuality as "an abnormality" and believes that the planned decriminalisation is a retrograde step for Irish society.

I do find the physical act absolutely revolting in the extreme.

David Norris believes that he has a right to make a contribution to society and as such to be treated as an equal citizen describing the current law as,

A violation of fundamental human rights.

Under Minister for Justice Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland with the passage of the second phase of the bill to decriminalise sexual acts between consenting adults under the Criminal Law Bill (Sexual Offences) in June 1993.

This episode of 'Prime Time' was broadcast on 29 April 1993. The presenter is Olivia O'Leary.

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Debating what it means to be gay after a European ruling that the law in Ireland making homosexual acts criminal must be changed. Following a lengthy campaign by Senator David Norris and the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, it was found that Irish laws prohibiting homosexual activities were in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights.

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Fundraising begins to establish a centre to house archive material on the history of gays and lesbians in Ireland.

The campaign called 'Friends of the Irish Queer Archive' was officially launched in Dublin by Labour's Deputy Leader Liz McManus, who said that it was important to highlight the gay community's contribution to Irish society.

I think it's important for all of us to understand the journey that the gay community has taken.

Gays News To Be Banned - NGF Newsletter - The Irish Queer Archive

Gay Rights Are Human Rights - The Irish Queer Archive

The collection comprises newspaper clippings and periodicals collected by gay and lesbian organisations since the early seventies.

Included are the first reports of AIDS in Ireland, the lesbian who came out on the Late Late Show and pamphlets highlighting gay rights.

The articles demonstrate how some attitudes have changed over the past twenty years, as well as highlighting challenges that still exist for homosexuals today.

Tonie Walsh - Irish Queer Archive Curator (2002)

Curator of the Irish Queer Archive Tonie Walsh provides a background to the collection describing the eighties as

A tawdry, sad, desolate period in lesbian/gay life in Ireland.

Tonie Walsh points out the level of denial in Ireland about the existence of the gay and lesbian community and says

The archive is about acknowledging the visibility and existence of lesbian/gay people.

Friends of the Irish Queer Archive are keen to make this material available to the public.

An RTÉ News report broadcast on 13 November 2002. The reporter is Mary Calpin.

Preserving Irish Queer History - Irish Queer Archive Curator (2002)

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Fundraising begins to establish a centre to house archive material on the history of gays and lesbians in Ireland. The campaign called 'Friends of the Irish Queer Archive' was officially launched in Dublin by Labour's Deputy Leader Liz McManus, who said that it was important to highlight the gay community's contribution to Irish society.

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speaking about being your self and preconcived ideas

Perceptions of homosexuality, identity and sexual orientation in Irish society.

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Perceptions of homosexuality, identity and sexual orientation in Irish society.

With more people opening up about their sexuality and demanding reform of the laws in Ireland, the Irish Gay Rights Movement is gaining in strength.

'Tuesday Report' examines how and why gay people in Ireland are becoming more vocal and the possibility of the laws surrounding homosexuality being changed.

Reporter Cathal O'Shannon writes in the RTÉ Guide.

The men and women in this film look just like you and me. They are accountants, civil servants, students, shop-workers, manual workers, office workers. The only difference is that their sexual orientation is towards their own sex. They speak for themselves and seek our understanding.

RTÉ Guide, 18 February 1977, page 3

In this excerpt from the programme, Irish men and women who have publicly come out as gay discuss the nature of homosexuality and the preconceptions that people have about them.

Jimmy describes both homosexuality and heterosexuality as a response of individuals to other individuals. He believes that perceptions some people have of homosexuals are ludicrous.

It is not a situation where homosexuals themselves are a mass of deviants who roam around the streets spotting people alone.

Cathal O'Shannon admits that he too has preconceived ideas about homosexuality. Much to the amusement of the group, which includes leader of the campaign for homosexual law reform David Norris.

I would have thought that most homosexuals would have been camp, prancing queens.

David Norris and Cathal O'Shannon (1977)

David Norris says homosexuality is just one part of an individual's personality. He believes that if homosexuals are more visible, then they can break down the preconceptions.

Poster on the wall of the Hirscheld Centre (1977)

After a visit to a gay disco at the Hirschfeld Centre, Cathal O'Shannon speaks to openly gay men and women who have no regrets about coming outl.

Sexuality of any sort is not easily discussed in Irish family circles, but many Irish mothers and fathers are having to face the fact that a son or a daughter is homosexual.

RTÉ Guide, 18 February 1977, page 3

This episode of 'Tuesday Report' was broadcast on 22 February 1977. The reporter is Cathal O'Shannon.

RTÉ Guide, 18 February 1977 - Tuesday Report Homosexuality in Ireland

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Perceptions of homosexuality, identity and sexual orientation in Irish society. With more people opening up about their sexuality and demanding reform of the laws in Ireland, the Irish Gay Rights Movement is gaining in strength. 'Tuesday Report' examines how and why gay people in Ireland are becoming more vocal and the possibility of the laws surrounding homosexuality being changed.

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use of props for an imseve experance colacetive experance

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Ann Hamilton on the creation of “at hand”

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Kareem Reid, founder of club night Body Party, contemplates navigating the world as a queer black body.

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Navigating the world as a queer black body | Day Dream by Stephen Isaac-Wilson | Random Acts

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Claude Cahun Aveux non avenus. Illustré d’hélio-gravures composées par Moore d’après les projets de la’auteur. Préface de Pierre Mac Orlan, courtesy of the British Library

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Claude Cahun Aveux non avenus. Illustré d’hélio-gravures composées par Moore d’après les projets de la’auteur. Préface de Pierre Mac Orlan, courtesy of the British Library

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Claude Cahun self portrait c.1927 courtesy Jersey Heritage collections

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Claude Cahun self portrait c.1927 courtesy Jersey Heritage collections

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inextinguishable fire, 2015

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www.spillfestival.com 
www.pacitticompany.com

THE SPILL FESTIVAL OF PERFORMANCE IS AN INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF LIVE ART, ACTIVISM AND PERFORMANCE PRESENTING THE WORK OF EXCEPTIONAL ARTISTS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE.


Cassils’ work Inextinguishable Fire speaks to the impossibility of representing certain forms of trauma and violence. How can we enact empathy when our own situation is so removed from the atrocities of torture and war? Using techniques borrowed from Hollywood stunts, Cassils experiences the very real human terror of being lit on fire. Cassils gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for and the impossibility of knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it.

‘When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes.

You’ll close your eyes to the pictures.

Then you’ll close them to the memory.

And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.’

- Harun Farocki

Inextinguishable Fire unpacks the often unquestioned “documentarian truth value” associated with mediated images and demands the viewer witnesses the construction of violence.

This performance will be followed by an outdoor film screening at the Southbank Centre.

Cassils is an artist who uses the physical body as sculptural mass with which to rupture societal norms. Forging a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative and formal purposes; it is with sweat, blood and sinew that they construct a visual critique and discourse around physical and gender ideologies and histories. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics, and Hollywood cinema, Cassils creates a visual language that is at once emotionally striking and conceptually incisive.

A SPILL Commission presented by Pacitti Company in partnership with the National Theatre
Film element supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and by MU Eindhoven, NL

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a transgender artist who is a sculpture, performer and photographer.
Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.

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CUTS: A TRADITIONAL
SCULPTURE is a six month durational performance of disciplined body sculpting.

Cassils reinterprets Eleanor Antin's 1972 Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which Antin crash diets for 45 days and documents her body daily through stark full-body photography. Cassils inverts Antin's process, using their mastery of bodybuilding and nutrition to gain 23 pounds of muscle over 23 weeks.

In contrast to the feminine act of weight loss in Antin's Carving, Cassils's CUTS involves transformation into a traditionally masculine muscular form. Four grids of time lapse photographs of Cassils's transformation are sorted by vantage point, offering a striking overview of the entire performance that draws out its conceptual clarity.

Fast Twitch/Slow Twitch

A two channel video installation contrasts the process that fueled CUTS with its material results. One channel features captivating yet revolting slow-motion images of Cassils swallowing raw eggs, eating meat with animalistic fervor, choking on supplements, and maxing out in near-orgasmic spasms of weightlifting exertion. The second is a time lapse video of the artists body, in which the 23 weeks of intensive bodybuilding are compressed into 23 seconds of muscular growth and physique sculpting.

Advertisement: Homage To Benglis

On the 160th day of Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, Cassils collaborated with photographer and makeup artist Robin Black to create Advertisement: Homage to Benglis. In this photograph, Cassils stages an homage to Linda Benglis's historic feminist artwork Advertisement (1974), in which Benglis poses with a double-ended phallus in an advertisement in Artforum. Cassils's ripped, transmasculine physique substitutes for Benglis's phallus. Rather than paying for advertising space, Cassils and Black disseminated these images of self-empowered trans representation to gay fashion and art publications, both print and digital. Placing Advertisement: Homage to Benglis within the context of LGBT-specific media signals a shift in American cultural landscape, while also highlighting the role of feminist artists like Benglis in bringing about those changes.

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CUTS: A TRADITIONAL SCULPTURE is a six month durational performance of disciplined body sculpting. Cassils reinterprets Eleanor Antin's 1972 Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, in which Antin crash diets for 45 days and documents her body daily through stark full-body photography. Cassils inverts Antin's process, using their mastery of bodybuilding and nutrition to gain 23 pounds of muscle over 23 weeks.

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Painting

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Painting

coving the body in another way,

femine and masklin

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They consume each other 2020

relious undertones

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They consume each other 2020

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Colby’s work activates these materials through political tactics of camp, issuing a call to reimagine our relationship to race, gender, sex, and class through camp and the mundane. Their queer interventions harness intimacy and fantasy, longing for new experiences and systems while simultaneously living them. Here, they are offering a space in which to enrich and expand understandings of memory, honesty, love, beauty, and grief.

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she begain to question her self when it came to people viweing her. so im thinking about how that change change my practice? if i take my body away or be more modist about it can i still covnvay the message i want to? most likly i can

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1978. Video (black and white, sound), 10:21 min.

Yvonne Rainer-regarded as a foundational force in American contemporary art, film, and postmodern dance-began her career in New York in 1956. After a false start in acting, she entered the Martha Graham School, a dance school and associated company named for its founder, who is largely credited with revolutionizing modern dance. There, Rainer discovered a passion for this art form. She was trained in a style of movement characterized by expressiveness and virtuosity and in narrative choreography filled with drama and psychological intensity. But Rainer grew dissatisfied with the conventions of modern dance and the traditional relationship between dancer and audience. As she has explained: "Early on, I began to question the pleasure I took in being looked at, this dual voyeuristic, exhibitionistic relation of dancer to audience." ¹ Fueled by such questioning, and her opposition to the tenets of classical and modern dance, she created Trio A.

Rainer choreographed Trio A in 1966, and performed it for the camera in 1978. Written for a solo performer, it incorporates no music and features a seamless flow of everyday movements like toe tapping, walking, and kneeling. "[It] would be about a kind of pacing where a pose is never struck," the artist once described. "There would be no dramatic changes, like leaps. There was a kind of folky step that had a rhythm to it, and I worked a long time to get the syncopation out of it." ² Trio A positioned Rainer as a leader among the dancers, composers, and visual artists who were involved in the Judson Dance Theater (which she co-founded in 1962), an avant-garde collaborative that ushered in an era of contemporary dance through stripped-down choreography and casual and spontaneous performances.

Yvonne Rainer, "No Manifesto," 1965.

Yvonne Rainer's "No Manifesto"
A year before creating Trio A, Yvonne Rainer wrote her "No Manifesto" (1965). Through it, she declared her opposition to the dominant forms of dance of the period-typified by Martha Graham-and outlined the tenets of her radical new approach:

No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved. ³

Early Recognition-a Double-Edged Sword?
Sometimes, artists find that groundbreaking work produced early in their career may overshadow the rest of their output. This was the case for Rainer with Trio A and "No Manifesto." In her words: "It's a little unfortunate, because it eclipses everything else I've done. [It's] the most out-there, visible signature of my career. That and the 'No Manifesto.'" ⁴ In the 1970s, she stopped dancing altogether and turned her attention fully to filmmaking, producing films including Lives of Performers (1972), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), and (1990). It was not until the 2000s that Rainer would return to choreography.

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1978. Video (black and white, sound), 10:21 min. Yvonne Rainer-regarded as a foundational force in American contemporary art, film, and postmodern dance-began her career in New York in 1956. After a false start in acting, she entered the Martha Graham School, a dance school and associated company named for its founder, who is largely credited with revolutionizing modern dance.

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no sound needed just movment. throwing her body around " no skill needed"

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Mark Leckey

3 years ago

As with many such unexamined remembrances, one wishes the artist could have seen past his misty-eyed nostalgia and also cried with laughter at the shambolic spectacle of his stumbling, graceless dancers (I did). When in actual sync, their stiff movements respond as much to electronic bass lines as to their being literally drunk or stoned out of their brains on ecstasy. Subversive this film is not, unless youth and drug culture is your idea of sticking it to the man. Rhythmically speaking, it doesn’t hold a glow stick to Soul Train.

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Gilbert & George: The General Jungle or Carrying on Sculpting

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Singing staues
George: “We’re very against the term gentrification. We think it’s classist and sexist, because you’d never say ladyfication.” Gilbert: “Or Jewification.” George: “Or blackification. Or Bangladeshification. They’ve only got it in for white people. It’s extraordinary. It’s punishing the honkies.”

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Aged 76 and 78 respectively, the renowned artist couple Gilbert and George are of the age supposedly most in need of isolating against the coronavirus. Yet exploring the streets of London has been their life since they met as students in 1967 - taking photographs, picking up unusual objects, observing the people around them. There is no second home for them abroad or in the country - their only residence is the house on Fournier Street in east London where they have lived since the 1960s.

So that is where they are holed up. And this week, they are releasing a series of glimpses into their lockdown life, as they unveil their video diary on White Cube's Instagram account.

In the first entry on Sunday, they revealed what they call in a handwritten title Our New Normal Walk. Wearing their trademark suits, they walk with deliberation around a line of tables in their home studio. First they do a circuit in single file, then they walk past each other from opposite sides of the tables.

In the foreground is an elegant varnished circular wooden table, laid with antique ceramics, twigs and plants. There's also a photograph of a young friend or relative on it. This picture surely symbolises everyone they feel cut off from. Gilbert and George are nothing if not social artists. Their art works are visceral documents of a changing Britain, from confrontational 1970s scenes of skinhead street life to a recent series that used empty nitrous oxide canisters collected on their urban walks.

They've lost the world, but the walk goes on. Gilbert and George find spiritual solace and aesthetic order in the simple ritual of promenading together. For them, London is the only place worth walking in. As students, they used to hike for miles right through the city until they reached the countryside. Now they are isolated in their own house, walking around a table laden with personally significant objects.

In Monday's video diary, they reveal Our New Normal Relaxing. Now there is just one long work table. Gilbert lies on one side of it doing exercises in his suit. George sits on the other side in a rocking chair, equally suited, reading a book. George is an avid reader who has worked his way through most of classic 19th-century British fiction. So his coronavirus reading is probably quite meaty although I can't make out the volume's title. It is as if they are enacting the duality of mind and body. While Gilbert exercises his limbs, George prefers a mental workout.

It turns out the funny, sad art of Gilbert and George is perfectly suited to capturing the "new normal". Formal and disciplined, yet always on the verge of surreal slapstick, their routines resemble a fraught attempt to maintain civilised codes in a chaotic world. Right now that's what we are all trying to do. Confined to their quarters, Gilbert and George appear to be acting out set routines to stop themselves going mad. Is the spectacle quietly heroic or is it a black farce by Samuel Beckett? That probably depends not only on how their series pans out - will their routines suddenly collapse into a New Abnormal? - but how the history we are experiencing unfolds.

"Ours is essentially a tragic age," wrote DH Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover, "so we refuse to take it tragically." Gilbert and George in their diary of the New Normal act out that defiance. They refuse to pity themselves and don't even consider giving up. Their stoic adaptation of their habits is quietly moving. Can't walk through London? They will walk at home. Can't go out? They can still exercise body and mind. These patriotic artists present their own cheerful manifesto for the coronavirus spirit, the new East End proving as courageous as the old one was in the 1940s. And yet there is a tension to this endurance, an undercutting hint of the absurd. We're fine, their studied normality insists. Absolutely FINE.

With its brittle poise, their diary is a perfect example of what makes Gilbert and George great artists of our times. They immaculately press on the nerves of this age of polite dread. And they offer the best advice they can in a scrawled final message - "Gilbert and George say: Don't get it!"

Gilbert and George's online diary is available at White Cube's Instagram. Posters are available at The Online Art Show.
Topics

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Lockdown with Gilbert and George: they've lost the world, but the walk goes on

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Aged 76 and 78 respectively, the renowned artist couple Gilbert and George are of the age supposedly most in need of isolating against the coronavirus. Yet exploring the streets of London has been their life since they met as students in 1967 - taking photographs, picking up unusual objects, observing the people around them.

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how can one influnaced by reliogion vs a "sin" that is commeted use the same hand movments?

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carboard figues of body parts, bras, under wear ect. hung up o the washing line

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drawing onto my own body as performace like in photos