Ceile & I (Caravan) and in the closet (Caravan)
also Tulca Talks 06
at Tulca and TulcaLive 2006
Galway

I participated in public talks on the theme 'Within Without' and delivered this text dealing with ideas around home.

HOME

Talk for Home


Home is where the lungs are to breathe
Home is where the throat is to speak
It is where the heart is to feel
it is the embodiment of the body

home is a dialectic between the inside and the outside
a porous boundary where the self is held in a creative tension


When at home we are secure, refuged, interior
This is where we restore our energies, become intimate
Inviting others into this space is an act of opening, a sharing of vulnerability and connection

I believe it is like an opening of our bodies to another in an act of love
The home is a body, a boney constructure and skin cladding an interior arrangement of vital processes, circulations, transformations of matter into energy, reproductions,
It is the skin and fat layer holding in movements of feeling and thought, a body outside the body
It is the place from which we reach out into environment and culture
In it I am contextual – inside the home you can read the manifestations of self in every object and ambiance. In our homes
We are blatantly expressed – in the home everything is a metaphor.

When I invite another into my home there is a desire to feed this person and while their mouths are full of tea and biscuits, I have the opportunity to speak the self and my desire while occupying this territory of asylum. I can speak my body while held within the body of the home.

The shelters I have made in my work over the last 5 years are such projections of self outwards and what else does art seek to do
They are spaces to reflect, be contained, where an atmosphere can be created and ideas explored which I hold the viewer in an active exchange of contingent body with the sited and relatively stable body of a home like structure.

The caravan is a different manifestation of externalised embodiment seeking permanence and structure, a site for self – because the caravan is a mobile outer body, a moving home.
I think of it as closer to the itinerant flesh and bone body
a closer approximation of the self in motion and
a metaphor for all the moving of homes we perform at the transitional moments of our lives.

One such time for me was when I lived in a caravan when my first child was born and the experience was full of paradox in that the caravan was…
Claustrophobic in the tightness of the skin over myself
Surgical in the precision of actions and gestures required to live
Marine like living on a boat adrift, always rocking gently
Austere in material things, economical, focused, enfolded
Being intimate and up-close to other people, the objects around one and the self allows for little deceit
We live out of a caravan, we live in a house

The remaining memories involve enduring water collection and water carrying, pouring basins, buckets…the heaviness of water, its transience. Other memories are of the inside and outside being interchangeable and permeable. The outside became another sort of 'within'

My mother told me that making a home is a lifes work, she said you will spend your life making it. We built our home in Clare around us inhabiting one room after another as it was constructed. It has its own being – at night it breathes and settles. It is alive in a symbiosis of porous exchange with us, haunted by us and responsive.
It is here the relationships between a group of people arise and find their form. In the caravan performances I re-enact some of the occasions of lived experience as one of these relating people. My daughter Ceile who is 15 will be making a performance with me next week about the development and modelling of our relationship of mother and daughter. How we gave birth to each other – how we express love and its opposites – holding our specific connection in creative tension and making more from our relationship, elaborating it in the work.

In my second performance I will be embedded within the architecture of the caravan – making an installation of inhabitation and showing aspects of intimacy and the up-closeness I spoke of earlier as viewers enter and leave the caravan at will, encountering stories told from the inside of cupboards and internal corners.

Over the couple of weeks of tulca, I will also be changing the installation of objects and light in the caravan, playing video works on a portable tv monitor in the space, to be viewed through the windows.

This flowing, shifting process of activities and arrangements of objects in the space mirrors our domestic life – the life project of making and remaking a home. All the works I make for this piece are generated from the raw material, the source material of my own lived experience – these activities retell my life history and re-enact, recreate it in new ways for the purposes of its reinterpretation, its examination and its unravelling. My intention in this work is to lay bare a life and its phenomena with the aim of communicating that to you, sharing it (in the sense that one life is all lives, relates to the experience of all beings) and to make new forms of relationship and connection happen in the process.