Emma Brennan in her studio, photograph by Kate Donaldson assisted by Niamh McCann
Photo courtesy of the artist
Damaris Athene: Could you start off by telling me a bit about yourself?
Emma Brennan: I’m a visual artist and now, I work a lot with performance. I'm originally from Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, and now I live in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and I've been here for almost three years. I came up here because I had a directorship with an organisation called Catalyst Arts.
DA: What's a directorship?
EB: It’s a two year voluntary role. They're a gallery and a not for profit, artist-led visual arts organisation. Your first year is like training and the second you run the organisation and get to program a year’s calendar of events. The same people run the board of management as are on the board of directors which keeps it non-hierarchical. They're funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. I was on their marketing sub committee and the chairperson on their board for the last year of my directorship. I ended up getting marketing jobs in the arts as a result and now do that for my day job with different organisations.
DA: Are you able to make enough time for your practice?
EB: It's been hard. I have a studio here at Flax Art Studios, and I go through bolts of being in there every evening and then times where I'm just very overwhelmed at work and I can't practice. It's definitely not consistent or balanced. I try not to give myself a hard time over it when I’m not getting in the studio. It can be really overwhelming doing jobs and trying to live and all that that includes as well.
DA: It's so hard to juggle everything as an artist and, like you're saying, it's so important to not give yourself a hard time when you can't get in your studio.
EB: Yeah, it is, but it's so easy to berate yourself. Sometimes I'll even just go into the studio on days that it's hard and just spend a day there but not do anything. I'm very forgiving of the fact that I was just in the space. Things come up eventually because I gave myself that time. Does that make sense?
DA: Totally. It's so important to have that time to sit and reflect and not put pressure on yourself to be making all the time. I find in my own practice when I force it, it's not good. You've got to be in the right headspace.
EB: Yeah, definitely.
Heed, to the Mound, Dublin Fringe Festival, The Complex, Dublin, 2018
Photo Credit: Carmen Reichle, Performer: Renee van de Schoor
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: It's not like some other kind of job that you can just switch on.
EB: No, you can’t. I'll be very frustrated for a really long time and my brain feels like mashed potatoes, and it just won't work, and then I'll be in the shower, or I will be having a conversation and then something will happen. Oh my gosh, that's an idea! I need to go and figure that out right now! So I think it's better not to force it.
DA: I definitely agree! Could you say a bit more about your practice? You've mentioned that it's mainly performance based?
EB: Yes, it is now. I did my BA in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and I did Fine Art and Media Studies. I ended up, towards the end of my BA, doing a lot of performance work but all video. I used a lot of green screen and it was very strict, scripted and comedic work, using tropes of TV, film, and advertising culture. I was assuming a character as well as being the videographer, the editor, the script writer. It was a one woman show! Towards the time of the degree I had started to dip into live performance. I'd done workshops with Dominic Thorpe and Emma Haugh. Live performance felt more successful for the stuff that I was trying to say but I didn't have the confidence to include it in my final show and I felt that there wasn't really that space for it in terms of marking or grading. My first ever live performance outside of college was with Livestock, a live art organisation in the south of Ireland run by Katherine Nolan and Francis Fay and at the time Eleanor Lawlor, who has since sadly passed away. They're really good at supporting people like me, coming out of college wanting to make live work in a supported environment. Then, what solidified my performance practice, was when I went traveling to Canada and our car got broken into. My laptop and my camera got stolen. It was a complete nightmare.
DA: Nooo! Oh my god!
EB: I had an upcoming residency with the Draíocht in Blanchardstown which was very much based around doing video work. It was a studio based residency and I didn't have the means of making multimedia work anymore. So I thought, I'm just gonna lean real hard into this performance stuff, because I have my body and analog ways of documenting. So that's how I've been working for the last few years. In the Draíocht I did end up doing a small triptych video installation of me moving an amount of dough equivalent to my bodyweight across the space. Then three TVs were placed in the exact same space where it was filmed so it looked as if my body was moving through the screens in that space.
DA: Cool!
Landscaping, Catalyst Arts Gallery, Re-Vision Festival 2020
Photo credit: Ben Malcolmson
Photo courtesy of the artist
EB: Yeah, that was fun to do. Then that grew into a live performance with a group of women for the Dublin Fringe Festival. We trained for it that whole summer, almost in a way that you would for a sport. We did a lot of mental and physical exercises, strength building, and creating a bond between us because we needed to be each other's support network for that day.
DA: What did that performance consist of?
EB: There were 10 women, 9 pushing mounds of dough equivalent to their own body weights.
DA: With yeast in it or just flour and water?
EB: Just flour and water. Then overnight, they proved and doubled in size. All of us moved our personal mounds through the space for about three hours. Then there was one assigned performer, Helen McGrath, who was our flour dredger. When it got too hard to move the dough, Helen would flour the floor, so that we could keep it moving.
DA: Wow, it sounds amazing. What is it that motivates you to work with performance and installation?
EB: I'm really interested in the things that happen in between the start and the end of things. Sometimes it’s about capturing the things that you can't see or touch, but feelings and energies that exist that are almost physical. I feel like you can do that with performance, through people feeling and connecting with the energy in the space. With wall based mediums I can’t get there. I like to work with dough because of a similar alchemy and its process of living, breathing and growing.
DA: Yeah, I guess it's all to do with the passing of time, and you need a medium that moves through time.
EB: Yeah, exactly, that's a good way of putting it, I'll write that down!
Hatching, Glassbox Gallery at Ulster University, Belfast International Festival of Performance Art 2021
Photo credit: Jordan Hutchings
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: *laughs* Apart from the living, breathing and temporal nature of dough, what other symbolism does it have for you within your practice?
EB: It's definitely related to my body, a projection of how I visualise or understand it and what it's like to live in it. It has a lot of maternal aspects for me in terms of creating a life and the body as an incubator. I think about that a lot. It’s linked to my Mam’s side of the family, especially to my Granny, who passed away in 2018. She always made brown soda bread and all the women in the family knew how to make it. In my final year of college, I was interested in the idea of value and exchange and what happens when you take monetary understanding out of it. How we perceive value is actually very different individually because it reflects our core values. I curated an exhibition of work that I obtained by exchanging a loaf of this bread that I made for artworks.
DA: Amazing!
EB: It was really nice. I got everything from, like, a beautiful self portrait painting by Salvatore of Lucan to a scrap page of someone’s notebook. For Sal, a handmade loaf of bread was so valuable to him and he equated that to the labor that he had put into that painting. That started me working with bread.
DA: You've mentioned the link with dough and bread to the female lineage of your family, and I was wondering what other ways your Irish identity has played into your practice?
EB: My Irish identity is very tightly woven into how I identify as female. Even in the last 10 years, there has been the Repeal The Eighth movement and the Marriage Equality movement but then there’s the cervical cancer scandal and the Motehr and Baby Homes graves. It feels like women are constantly being disappointed by the Irish government, but yet there has also been massive achievements from its people. I'm working with dough and I'm working with my ancestry and sentimentality and that is so specific to me being a woman. The matriarch is very important to me. I have three brothers and no sisters, and my mam is from a Catholic family of 11 children where there are only three girls. It's a heavily male dominated family. She’s from Longford, which is in the midlands of Ireland and quite a rural area. There's a lot of bog and farm land around there. I grew up with these associations to the land and split labor practices for men and women. This personal heritage informs my decisions around performances, like costumes or materials or gestures as well as the grander history of Ireland. I've been reading a lot about the move here from Paganism to Christianity and its result on women. Bridget for example was a leader and a goddess before Christianity, where she was reappropriated into a saint under their patriarchy.
Water Bodies, with Cara Farnan and Jennifer Moore, Catalyst Arts Gallery, 2020
Photo Credit: Simon Mills
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: How do you feel your work has developed since finishing your BA in Dublin?
EB: It’s definitely more confident. In particular, I’ve figured out a lot about what actually works for me and what doesn't in how I work in a studio. I found it difficult, without people validating or challenging me like they did in college. I think I was self conscious in the studio in college, and wouldn’t take up space or make a mess or really get into something for the consideration of others.
DA: How do you usually work and how has that been affected over the last year?
EB: I would call my process a constant collage. I’m always collecting thoughts, whether it’s through conversation, cooking, watching films, going to events, whatever! Then I just let them sit there in my brain and when I’m in the studio, I trust that the important things will come to the front. I basically enter into a child-like state of play there. I don't force anything too much. Sometimes I'll just read or sit then sometimes I could literally spend hours making a big mess. I'll look back on it later and be like, what am I trying to get out there? In performances I might make a gesture or make certain decisions that I don't even understand at the time, but actually comes from spending that time in my studio. Allowing myself to be bored as well you know, boredom is a really good space to make, it’s a very fertile ground for thought.
DA: Definitely, and something we don't often experience in our modern ever connected lives. Have you been able to continue that process like normal?
EB: In the first lockdown we weren't able to go into the studios so I basically turned our front room into a little mini studio. It was really nice to have that time to figure things out. Since things have opened back up, it actually feels harder to back into that funk. I almost have to figure out how to be back in the world again, everything feels very busy and chaotic and overwhelming.
DA: Yeah, I’ve been feeling that too! When people see your work, what would you like them to get from it?
EB: I really like people to come to work, any work, with an open mind and take from it whatever they want and to make their own opinions. I don't like telling people too much so then they can make their own associations with it.
Dough Scales, Flax Art Studios, 2021
Photo courtesy of the artist
DA: That's a great way to think about it. Who's work inspires you?
EB: I could go on for ages! Thinking of female performance artists in Ireland, you can't not talk about Amanda Coogan. She’s always working and making impressive stuff. She's also a very sound person and an excellent teacher. Then of course there’s BBeyond, who are a performance collective in Northern Ireland, they do a lot of stuff in public space. I'm a member of theirs now as I got their 2021 New Commission Artists Award. Out of which I got a mentorship from an artist I greatly admire, Siobhan Mullen Wolfe. She makes really stunning work and is incredibly generous, empathetic, and compassionate in her work and her mentorship. She’s had a massive impact on my work this year. I think often the biggest influences are your peers. I have friends who are artists, poets, musicians, screenwriters and more. I worked with Cara Farnan and Jennifer Moore as part of my Catalyst director show ‘Waterbodies’. I worked with them because they're my dear friends and we connect on an intimate level. They're both incredible artists and have a very nice way of working, in particular when working with others which is important to me.
DA: What projects are you working on at the moment?
EB: I'm going to be performing a work as part of the Cathedral Arts Festival in Belfast. It was postponed from May to September because of the pandemic. I'm working on that as part of the award with BBeyond. I'm also showing work as part of a show called 'Butter and Eggs' which is curated by Moran Been Noon in November.
DA: Lots of things going on then! Do you have any other plans for future work? Or are you just focused on producing the stuff for these shows?
EB: There were a couple of months where I was hell for leather applying for stuff and then suffering the rejections of most. You know what that's like! At least I have a bank of very good applications now, including a proposal for a completely new body of work that I really want to make, I just need the funding.
DA: Fingers crossed that you manage to find some funding! Thank you so much Emma. It was lovely to meet you.
EB: Thank you!
