I presented a paper at the Postgraduate Conference LSAD, March 2006, early in my PhD project, outlining my aspirations and understanding of the work that lay ahead.


MANY TYPES OF CONVERSATIONS

Performance is another type of conversation

Outline of PhD topic

I am going to show you examples of work I have been making over the past 5 years in performance, video and installation.
As an artist this practice is ongoing, evolving, being refined over time. But as a result of applying this work to a dedicated programme of research & development (the PhD)
I will focus my engagement, concentrate my energy, apply critical and rigorous thought
I will conduct new conversations on the performance of myself between you and me –
Conversations that could not otherwise happen in any other life situation.
The value of this exercise is I believe a growth all involved participate in, because it is a collective venture – a set of interconnecting relationships between myself, my work and others, the work of others.

In this project, this PhD work, I am interrogating subjectivity, the experience of selfhood, autobiography, auotexpression and I am translating my examinations into live performance works. These works will be re-presentations, Re-Enactions of actual lived experience, but framed, staged, re-contextualised so that the work exists beyond the life it references, becomes more than the life, becomes a new form of life itself.

For example I want to re-enact a love affair, a birth, a primal scene from early childhood among others…
These Re-Enactions will elaborate on life, mirror and expose life for the purpose of making one life emblematic and relating to all lives. We have all lived the trajectory of a love affair from exquisite longings to tears…we have all known birth and the formative experiences of infancy…as Christian Boltanski says
“we have all been afraid of the dark and wished our mother would say goodnight to us, and we’ve all been jealous, and we’ve all had a pretty daft great aunt whom we were fond of…The really interesting autobiographies are those that do not only talk about the author but about every reader”

I am also interested in seeing to the limits of myself, an act which others can part-take of vicariously, as audience, in catharsis and witness of the artist ‘acting out’ herself.
In my research I hope to look at the subject and the construction of self psychoanalytically. I am also charting the process of creating artwork from this research, I am documenting the act of creation of performance works from the raw material of life.


Why Do a PhD

My reasons for undertaking the PhD are
Growth and Transformation

It is a challenge and an endeavour and a way of formalising a body of work…

I live in a remote place, with children – and it has been difficult to access the arts infrastructure, go to openings, make contacts and be noticed by galleries, reviewers, to situate myself and my work in the critical and theoretical world of contemporary ideas.
Doing a PhD is a direct hot-line into the centre of art activity. It has given me the opportunity to have conversations at a high level of engagement and struggle with ideas, and that is difficult to find elsewhere.
Over the past 15 years I have been ravenous for penetrating, alert, exciting contact and community that the involvement in a PhD programme provides.

As a live artist, a performance artist, I think I especially need a LIVE audience to dialogue with. This Art form is not particularly feted or celebrated here in Ireland so finding a good audience (an interested, informed one) is like finding gold and the PhD community of supervisors and students is a ready-made audience – a captive audience.


The PhD is an opportunity to progress my work more quickly, more radically, more critically than I could achieve on my own. It is an opportunity to progress my career as an artist by providing me with a visible public profile (especially as one of the first practice based PhD’s in Ireland), it puts me at the forefront of my profession.

Practicalities of my PhD experience (I am in my first year)

I have just begun on this adventure, which feels like a great gift to myself.

I could not do this PhD if it were not part of, an extension of, my ongoing practice and an extension of my life. I continue my studio practice in between teaching, hanging out the washing, making dinner, bringing the kids to school…and the PhD is linked into all & everything.
I think about it every day. I plan actions and ideas while driving back and forth through the Burren, I write a thousand words on the train to Dublin and a thousand on the way back. I write notes in eyeliner and crayons on any scrap of paper I find. I talk about it ceaselessly to family and friends, keeping it alive and throbbing.
Other PhD survival tactics I have developed are a high degree of focus on what I am doing in this moment, leaving aside all past future and other distractions.
I operate like a magpie and opportunistically grab references, ideas, approaches and information from any source, from anything I encounter in daily life or from books, film, media or incidental conversations.
I advise advanced time management strategies for anyone in my position interested in doing a PhD – a well balanced, schedulized life along with a very supportive family is crucial.
I believe this must be the way for most PhD students who are mature experienced people with complex lives – we must invent new models for research methods and
project development techniques that intersect with our lives,
overlapping and blending into life with the aim that everything rises up together,
the aim that nothing becomes diminished through the experience.

At our 1st NCAD PhD seminar session in September, a Doctor from Spain told us how she had no life for 3/ 4 years doing her PhD. I would say the converse to be true for me – the PhD now is my life, my life is the topic and the practice of living (and reflecting on it) is the work.
At the centre of the academic process, the academic experience of the PhD -
are relationships and conversations. Every development in the work comes out of this. The interconnecting web of relationship between myself and my supervisors must be open, equal, creative, warm to sustain gestation, to allow for a birth to happen.
As with any functional relationships in life, certain conditions are necessary for mutual growth and transformation. This process should be mutual, it should be a shared growth for the benefit of all involved, students, supervisors and institutions.

The student & supervisor thus need to set the scene from early on, to establish a structure of support and 2 way feedback with integrity, trust and honesty. The conversations which then take place in this environment can subvert, radicalise, overturn, explode received ideas alongside create, invent and conceive of new ones.

As students and supervisors we need to manage each other:

Students expect to be supervised, expect their supervisors to be available when needed, to be constructively critical and they need a comfortable environment in which to share ideas. Supervisors should be people who embody in their own practice the highest aspirations of the student – they should be role models for…committed practice, integrity and have the ability to transcend their own self interest in the relationship and project into the specific needs of the student. They ha, .

Supervisors expect their students to be independent, to prepare for meetings and to be excited about their work, to surprise them. Supervisors expect students to be honest, dedicated and to produce well developed work.

These are some of the expectations between student and supervisor. To enable these to be met, Contracts of action, expectation and outcome can be negotiated between student and supervisor. Psychological contracts can be agreed upon if necessary allowing for personal issues and emotional concerns to be dealt with. Doing a PhD is a very emotional experience which involves the whole person, and everyone involved has invested themselves in profound ways. It should be an exciting and stimulating struggle able to support creative conflict and creative tension alongside nice pleasant harmonious things.

Another condition of this relationship involves transparency of intent, of desire and of communication to avoid ending up with any metaphorical blood on the walls. The relationship also has to allow for messy risky dirty stuff, art colleges are dirty places and art is often chaotic and anarchic, especially in its early embryonic stages…the relationships have to be fluid enough, accepting and open enough, to sustain and to endure around this.

In my direct experience at NCAD these issues have been addressed by my supervisors in a sort of learning together environment, figuring out the required needs, trying to articulate expectations and to forestall problems. I enjoy the fact I am one of the first students to help construct a good model for practice and I enjoy being part of inventing, creating the process. There have been stutterings in the articulation of the programme, but in general it has been eloquent and dignified in the attempt to speak itself and to make the conversation happen. I also appreciate that the programme allows for my individual professional & family requirements. That there is flexibility in the programmes structure is crucial, as every student has differing backgrounds and needs.

A very useful part of our programme is the PhD seminar sessions which happen every month, where PhD students from different departments meet to discuss our projects, organise speakers and events. This opportunity to share ideas and learning resources is wonderful and a highlight of the programme. As students at every level recognise, we often learn hugely from each other and from observing each other’s process. This group also provides a support structure, a network that is different from the supervisory team, working in parallel but running on different lines.

To summarise, as the PhD is now the highest academic structure within Fine Art, it should embody the highest principles of practice in our profession
It should be our duty to set standards now at the beginning and to establish our own unique culture of practice in Ireland. We should be idealistic and ambitious now and make mission statements for the deliverance of PhD which reflect only the best and most beautiful ideals for advanced education and practice in Art.

We must be expansive and push the limits of what it is to do a PhD and what it is to be a creative human being if the project is to be successful.