‘The Well’ is a 3 screen video installation.
In 2016 a live public performance intervention was developed at St Patrick’s Well, drawing on the story of Bridget Cleary, who was killed in 1897 amid accusations of witchcraft. The work returns to the well as a site shaped by layered histories, belief systems and collective memory.
A year later, the project revisits the site to create a film work in collaboration with David Flannery, the custodian of the well, whose daily practices of care and maintenance form a quiet, continuous ritual of stewardship. This grounded, quotidian presence is set alongside the movement of dancer Liv O’Donoghue, whose restless, embodied gestures appear to draw on the latent energies of the site. Although never directly meeting, both figures inhabit the well as a shared host environment.
As in earlier works situated at ancient and pre-Christian sites, the well is approached as a symbolic and material space where landscape, ritual and collective imagination intersect. It becomes a threshold site: associated with memory, healing, fertility and forms of female power.
The resulting three-screen video installation combines real and constructed performances, brought together through a minimal sound design by Ellen King. The work holds together different registers of presence and time, allowing ritual, labour and embodied movement to coexist within a single expanded cinematic field.
Review of exhibition https://curatoronabike.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/yvonne-mcguinness/
Duration: 13 mins, 30 seconds.
Director – Yvonne Mc Guinness
Dancer – Liv O Donoghue
Director of photography – Michael Kelly
Sound Design – Ellen King
Editor – Yvonne Mc Guinness, Micheal Kelly and Paddy Cahill
Supported by:
