This has been an exciting month in the Elbow Room as I launch

 ReWilding Bodies

a participatory creative movement practice, 

embodied through the senses, guided by ethics and eco-somatic principles, for ur future.

First ReWilding Bodies Workshops will be at The Elbow Room, Burren Artists Studios @The Gentian Press, Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare on Tuesday nights starting in September.  

  ReWilding Bodies Research  has commenced with Rachel Sweeney and  Tara Mooney in the Elbow Room this summer with Abi Ighodara coming this weekend and Russell Brown in September.

Skying - a course in embodied colour and painting

January -February 2021 SKYING

Constable termed 'skying' as a verb; lying on the ground looking up at the sky. While we didn't actually lie on the ground, we did connect through movement practice to being grounded as the portal to this experimental creative process.   

I developed an 8 weeks live participatory online course working with 6 participants exploring colour through an embodied creativity process; a sensorial inquiry, exploring our embodied relations to the sky as our subject matter through water-colour painting- Sounds, textures, smells, colours and our imaginations.

Redefines our relations with the space around us, focusing on cloud-watching, a great distraction from the shifting ground of the pandemic.
 

Tidal Welly Walking 1st October 2020 onwards

On the1st October 2020 on Lahinch beach I invited a group of local friends/artists to partake in an embodied pilot 'walk,' a somatic movement based exploration experiencing the conditions of the space between high and low tide on the beach.  Exploring the possibilities of sensorial walking through somatic insights from Body-mind Centering, Origins (Joan Davies) Traditional Chinese Medicine integration, contemporary dance techniques and Antoinette Spillane Still Point method. 

This process of inquiring is an experimental, open-ended, art and movement-based creative research practice being explored between Rachel Sweeney and Maria Kerin and co-aligners under the umbrella title ARTICULATING THRESHOLDS through a transdisciplinary, translocal, post site-specific lens.

This practice developed over the Autumn/Winter when possible with different participants. 

Thanks to all who participated. We will return to the beach after the lockdown.

Articulating Thresholds- collaboration with Rachel Sweeney

As part of our collaborative process through Karum-Creevagh research framework, Rachel and I are exploring a movement-based research approach to cultural heritage research through 'adaptation' and weaving back and forth through timelines, in a tanslocal, post-site specific inquiry,  supported by somatic principles: 

Articulating Thresholds - an afternoon of tea, talking and moving around questions of how we dance with change.

We had a two-week residency at the Burren College of Art (February 2020), which included 2 open studio invites to artists, dancers, environmentalists, archaeologists, and community elders to join us in a participatory multi-disciplinary inquiry, including storytelling, drawing, materials sharing (bone), movement and dance.

"Consciously striving to dance at the thresholds and slippages of artistic and environmental disciplines, we ask how adaptation might act as a strategy to inform our conscious encounter with radical change. Looking back as we move forward, our work maps timelines of Irish cultural heritage practices, particularly around water rituals in sacred sites that inform both metaphoric and real-time understandings of body-place relations".

We have facilitated 3 local sharings this year and continue our research process together through weekly movement practice sharings online.

Burren College Residency, 9 Dec- 22 Dec 2019

The road that leads nowhere.

In December 2019, I spent 2 weeks daily driving an inspirational route, passing Poulnabrone dolmen and others, passing the road that leads nowhere, as I made my way over Ailwee mountain, to the beautiful Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare. The journey of about 40 minutes from my home outside Ennistymon set the atmosphere for my studio work, pulling me back in time, playing with the multitemporal.

PhD on hold

Year 2 of my PhD research into decision making through somatic principles for transdisciplinary collaborations is on hold once again.

in search of the eel...

February 2019 when starting my explorations with Danny Burke for Karum Creevagh Experimental Heritage process connecting with Kilshanny,  I had a dream that was to be a point of departure : inside a box were eels coming out of the belly of a body.

For the past 9 months Danny and I have regularly met and discussed art and archaeology of the area, starting with Kilmakreehy on the estuary and going upriver to Kilshanny.

See Creevagh- Kilshanny Research blog for photos.

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