Solo exhibition, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland, 21 Oct–14 Jan 2023

Rehearsals was a solo exhibition of new fabric and film works developed in response to the environs, architecture and social histories of Kilkenny, both past and present. Embedded within this collective landscape is the artist’s own familial connection to the city, where three generations have been involved in its political life a lineage that quietly informs the work’s ongoing engagement with civic participation and public voice.

The practice is rooted in creating conditions where individuals and communities can use performance and collective action to reflect on, and sometimes disrupt, systems of power. Over a six-month period, collaborations were developed with school children at St John’s Senior School and members of Equinox Theatre Ensemble, both based in Kilkenny. These encounters form the foundation for two new film works, emerging through shared processes of rehearsal and improvisation.

In Priory, the ruins of Callan Augustinian Priory become a site for staged rehearsals, where performance, architecture and memory converge. Within this layered cinematic space, boundaries between performer and audience begin to dissolve. An official’s speech is interrupted, the audience becomes active participant, and the structure of authority is momentarily unsettled. Energy circulates between bodies, objects and space, before settling back into stillness as the shadow of the building shifts and the scene resolves.

In Schoolyard, a group of children construct a spontaneous scene within a tightly framed duration. Without direction, a collective rhythm emerges through which chaos and coherence coexist. Comedy, catastrophe and ritual intertwine as a kind of improvised tableau takes shape. Across the exhibition, the films enter into dialogue with one another, one unfolding within a site of historical ruin, the other within a schoolyard, testing and extending the institutional and spatial boundaries in which they are framed. These works can be understood as “rehearsals of readiness,” in which collapse, ritual and collective improvisation coalesce as forms of embodied anticipation.

In the gallery, large-scale fabric assemblages extend these processes into material form. Developed as part of an evolving archive of the practice, these works function as collective surfaces capable of being touched, altered, stitched, unpicked and reconfigured. Wearable silk works are suspended throughout the space, presenting fragmented forms drawn from a shifting visual vocabulary: a statue without a head, an altar without a church, images suspended between objecthood and dissolution against chroma green fields.

Costumes and works on paper operate as open prompts for performance, while a continuous soundscape holds the exhibition together. A pianist’s tentative melody threads through the space, underscoring a sense of ongoing rehearsal within the turbulence of the present. Across film, textile and sound, the exhibition constructs a field of interconnected gestures in which order, play and uncertainty continually reconfigure one another.