‘Moving mountains, wishing well, Bridget Cleary we won’t tell’
Developed at St Patrick’s Well in Clonmel, this work responds to the story of Bridget Cleary, a woman killed in 1896 amid accusations of witchcraft and engages with its lingering presence within Irish cultural memory.
Working with a group of local female participants, the performance unfolds as a collective, site-responsive ritual that activates the well as a charged landscape of healing, folklore, and layered belief systems. Rather than retelling the historical event, the work approaches it through embodied action, using durational gesture and gathering to explore how histories of gendered violence and social control remain inscribed within place.
The sacred site of St Patrick’s Well becomes a focus for reflecting on feminine presence and agency, drawing attention to both contemporary lived experience and older cosmologies in which landscape was understood as animate and relational. Through this framework, the performance opens a space where collective participation, memory, and site converge, allowing the work to operate as both an invocation and a mode of listening to place.
Cameraman: Micheal Kelly
Soundscape: Ellen King