SANDRA CORRIGAN BREATHNACH

Unfinished Business, curated by Deej Fabyc for Live Art Ireland, brought together a series of artists whose performances unfolded through material, movement, sound, smell, and ritual. For example, Sandra Corrigan Breathnach’s work Trust (2026) incorporated the scent and sound of fresh clay and charcoal, while Mariya Hoyin’s Never again (2026) centered on daily movement as both a ritual and a political act. While each work maintained a distinct approach, they collectively asserted that meaning emerges primarily through the immediacy of live encounters rather than through representational strategies. Accordingly, this review analyses eight live art performances—including Starkey’s maternal exploration of sound and materiality, A void; beetroot, eggs, honey and menstrual blood (2026), and Fable Lane’s immersive, serene sonic environment/set—and argues that live art and live music do not simply invite observation of difference. Instead, they foreground the embodied experience of difference, situating it as an ongoing, relational process that persists beyond the temporal limits of the event. Thus, the central argument is that live art and music function as modalities through which difference is directly engaged and continually reshaped through bodily interaction and shared presence. This review adopts an explicitly anti-extractive methodological stance. My reflections arise exclusively from my own embodied witnessing and lived experience of the event, deliberately eschewing empirical data, interviews, or participant testimony. In place of outcome-oriented evaluation, I foreground a personal, relational narrative that prioritises presence, sensory perception, and unfolding processes. This approach is grounded in de-colonial methodological commitments that resist knowledge-extraction practices that have historically privileged dominant ways of knowing while marginalising others. By exploring non-extractive, affective, and relational modes of inquiry, I seek to hold rigorous space for reflexivity, recognising that the researcher’s own position, attunement, and accountability fundamentally shape knowledge production.

My approach is slower, I describe what I see, it’s the space between what’s being shared and my body with its own history. I do not provide an objective view that jumps to projection and conclusions. There is no absolute conclusion here. This methodology aims to honour both the specificity of subjective experience and the ethical imperative to avoid objectifying or appropriating others’ insights, thereby aligning with broader anti-extractive and de-colonial research paradigms.

There is an inherent problem in writing about this event at all. Any act of writing risks fixing, extracting, or translating what was relational, sensory, and continually unfolding. Even within an anti-extractive methodology, the text inevitably becomes a site of reduction. To resist this, I have written in an open, unfolding manner, remaining attentive to the tensions between experience and representation. I recognise that writing cannot fully hold what occurred without altering it through my own body and perception. Rather than seeking to capture the performances, I write to trace the ways in which live art generates and transmits knowledge through embodied witnessing. Live art is an accessible mode of knowledge production in which understanding emerges through encounter. This unsettles the binary of the knowledgeable knower and the passive receiver, demonstrating instead that knowledge is co-created through relation. What Starkey describes dancing-with (Starkey, 2018, 2023), it requires at least two bodies: each shaping and being shaped by the encounter. Meaning does not pass intact from one to the other but unfolds between them, through attention, presence, and shared experience.

For students interested in applying anti-extractive, de-colonial methods in their own research or creative work, several practical strategies might be helpful. For example, rather than relying solely on interviews or extracting quotes from participants, they might prioritise processes of shared reflection or co-creation, where knowledge is generated collaboratively and with ongoing consent (the event itself, in this case Unfinished Business). Students could foreground their own positionality and embodied experience, making clear how their perspectives shape the research process. Emphasising consent, reciprocity, and respect for participants’ autonomy is essential. In creative practice, this could mean working alongside communities or collaborators, allowing space for collective authorship and ensuring each contributor has agency over their own narratives. Simple acts such as returning drafts to collaborators for feedback, allowing participants to withdraw or modify their contributions, and engaging in transparent dialogue about intention and impact can help to minimise extraction. I have initiated this myself through shared Word documents, creating a space where suggestions and amendments can be discussed with my supervisors in real time, allowing dialogue rather than unilateral decision-making. By cultivating patience, sensory attention, ongoing conversation, and reflexivity, students can produce work that honours difference and affirms ethical responsibility. Witnessing necessitates time, attention, patience, respect, and a willingness to remain present, particularly when discomfort arises. In this review, I introduce the term “de-colonial relational force” to refer to the dynamic process through which encounters—especially those that provoke discomfort—catalyse shifts in perception and relationality, thereby creating the possibility to interrogate and destabilise dominant colonial frameworks of seeing, thinking, and knowing. By ‘de-colonial relational force’, I mean a force or influence within encounters that specifically resists colonial modes of knowledge and power by foregrounding relationality, embodied experience, and the ongoing negotiation of difference. Discomfort in this context is not simply a negative feeling to be avoided but is understood as a productive tension—a necessary disruption that foregrounds the power relations that shape how we experience art and knowledge. When I refer to discomfort, I am pointing to the embodied sensation that arises when our habitual ways of relating are unsettled, making visible the invisible structures that persist in Western educational and cultural institutions. Given that these structures are deeply embedded, their

disruption is rarely comfortable. As Ahmed (2017) contends, challenging what has become normalised within institutional life is never a frictionless process. It often requires invisible forms of labour, positioning discomfort as a necessary condition for transformation. This approach contrasts with the ocularcentrism identified by scholars such as Rose (2001) and Jay (1994), who argue that Western educational and aesthetic traditions have historically privileged vision as the dominant avenue to knowledge, thereby establishing hierarchies of perception and reinforcing structures of authority. In such frameworks, vision often serves to naturalise inherited modes of seeing that regulate and constrain the production of meaning (see also hooks, 1994; Ahmed, 2006). The performances reviewed here actively unsettled this hierarchy by insisting that sound, smell, touch, movement, texture, and material presence are equally legitimate modalities for generating understanding and perception. This aligns with Ahmed’s (2006) concept of orientation, whereby alternative sensory engagements can disrupt normative ways of perceiving shaped by whiteness as a structural orientation.

Rather than reinforcing what Du Bois (1903) famously termed the ‘white veil,’ or reproducing institutional blind spots that dictate how certain bodies are seen and unseen, these works foster conditions in which dominant perceptual habits can be destabilised and rendered visible. While such moments do not resolve structural whiteness, they expose its operations, allowing other modes of relation, attention, and embodied knowledge to emerge (Ahmed, 2017). Within this framework, dancing-with (Starkey, 2018, as developed in Starkey, 2023) positions originality not as the pursuit of novelty but as a practice of attunement. Similarities do not erase differences; they heighten them, becoming perceptible through the sensory, affective, and relational modes each witness can access. Rather than relying on a single hierarchy of perception, these performances open multiple pathways – sound, smell, touch, movement, texture, and material presence alongside vision—through which resonance and repetition can deepen perception and understanding. This multiplicity allows subtle distinctions and relational knowledges to emerge without assuming a uniform sensorium. Allowing subtle distinctions, relationships, and forms of relational knowledge to emerge that a purely visual mode of attention might otherwise overlook.

Deej Fabyc, whose long practice moves between performance, installation, and feminist psycho- social inquiry, shaped Unfinished Business with a curatorial sensibility attuned to the unfinished, relational nature of embodied knowledge (Fabyc, 2026). Her artistic practice has consistently explored the psychological dimensions of personal and political trauma alongside embodied narratives of neurodiversity, ageing, chronic illness, vulnerability, and loss, positioning the body not simply as a subject of representation but as a site through which knowledge is produced (Fabyc, 2026). This long-standing commitment provides an important context for understanding the curatorial decisions underpinning Unfinished Business. Rather than presenting Unfinished Business as a fixed singular theme, Fabyc mobilised it as a curatorial proposition: that meaning remains open, negotiated, and continually reworked through live encounters. This proposition directly underpins the central argument of this review, which contends that live art and live music function as modalities through which difference is embodied, encountered, and continually reshaped through shared presence. Within this curatorial framework, the live art informed how the music was registered, while the music, in turn, continued to shape the memory and afterlife of the live art performances. Neither medium arrived at a definitive clean break; instead, each remained unfinished through its ongoing entanglement with the other. Reverberating Moten’s (2003) conception of the break as a generative space of ongoing relation rather than rupture, meaning emerged through resonance, repetition, and embodied encounter rather than closure.

Fabyc’s collaborative practice also helps explain the exhibition’s refusal of singular interpretation. Having worked for decades within feminist collectives, artist-run initiatives, and collaborative performance networks, their practice consistently embraces relational processes over individual authorship (Fabyc, 2026). This ethos was evident in Unfinished Business, where live art and music continually informed one another through materiality, sound, movement, ritual, and sensory exchange. Fabyc curated conditions in which artists could remain with uncertainty, memory, vulnerability, and process on their own terms. The exhibition therefore resisted closure, inviting audiences to witness meaning emerging through encounters rather than arriving as predetermined interpretation. Read through this lens, the performances collectively enacted what I describe as a de-colonial relational force. Her significance lay not in resolving tensions or communicating singular messages but in sustaining the embodied negotiations through which different ways of sensing, knowing, and relating could coexist. Fabyc’s curatorial approach therefore became more than an organisational framework; it established the relational conditions that enabled the exhibition’s central concern with difference, embodiment, and ongoing transformation to unfold across the program.

Sandra Corrigan Breathnach | Trust

The live art event opened with Sandra Corrigan Breathnach. Breathnach began by inviting viewers to participate in covering her body with a pale green, almost white clay. Against the gallery’s white walls, the clay retained its own material presence rather than disappearing into space. Each participant was guided by her hand as they applied the clay. When she chose me, I noticed how cold her hand was, so I held it gently in mine as I applied the clay to her collarbone. The powerful decision to maintain autonomy was striking, while still creating skin-to-skin contact, with the clay acting as a binder between bodies. Rather than positioning herself as a passive body for the audience, Breathnach asserted herself as the author of the encounter, enacting the principles of agency and authorship foregrounded in feminist theory. The performance exemplified a nuanced negotiation between vulnerability and agency, demonstrating how intimacy can be intentionally constructed without relinquishing artistic control and thus aligning with broader theoretical frameworks that challenge patriarchal narratives of the artist’s body as object.

The work also resonated with me on a personal level. I have used white substances in my own practice and invited people to cover me in both acrylic and clay-based paint for Construct Me (2013). Yet the material qualities here felt distinctly different. More importantly, her decision to guide each participant’s hand was a phenomenal gesture. It refused inherited and particularly patriarchal assumptions about the passive female body in performance and the Western canon in general, actively moving beyond dominant figures such as Abramovic and Yoko Ono – unsettling the expectation that intimacy must be built through surrender rather than agency. I found this decision deeply compelling. The texture of the clay, its sound against the skin, its gentle, sensual application, and its physical weight created an experience that cannot be adequately translated through photography, which inevitably flattens these sensory differences into apparent sameness. The piece unfolded ceremonially. After being covered in clay, Breathnach stripped pieces of bark, handing one to each participant and drawing us into the ritual. She then wrapped the remaining bark around her own arms. The gesture reminded me of the way damaged trees are sometimes healed: clay applied to a wound before being wrapped in a natural bandage, allowing new growth to emerge. The stripped willow bark became part of her rebirth, something that could lay new foundations. I felt that placing her work first in the line-up was a fantastic curatorial decision by Deej Fabyc. Carrying traces of clay on her hands, Breathnach touched the exposed wood before crushing charcoal, releasing black dust that dispersed across her body. Breathnach, wearing a self-made skirt adorned with a clipping of her own hair, started crunching the charcoal under the weight of a branch, the sound and experience enigmatic. The act resembled a non-verbal chant, an invitation to embrace darkness alongside light. And a strong welcoming into a matriarchal tribe. I, alongside others, accepted her invitation.

The performance – a spiritual awakening. Rather than sustaining a phallocentric system of binary oppositions, it embraced complexity. White, black, grey, and the countless nuances between them coexisted, resisting simple divisions. Breathnach’s performance proposed that healing, identity, and transformation do not emerge from opposites, but from the space where they meet. The work was born somewhere outside these constructs, and I applaud her for this. Her work identified a fragile and often overlooked truth: that difference has to be experienced. Performance art loses much of its material, sensory, and temporal presence when it is flattened into photography. Although photographic documentation might suggest similarities—such as bodies covered in white or pale substances—these apparent resemblances dissolve in the live encounter. Witnessed alongside one another, the differences become unmistakable. Breathnach’s pale clay retained its own material density, temperature, and tactile presence, while Starkey’s white surfaces challenged the gallery walls and functioned in an entirely different register. Before the event, Starkey had intended to use white paint but ultimately decided against it because of the perceived visual similarity to Breathnach’s work. Yet the performances themselves demonstrated the opposite. Presented relationally, the works did not collapse into one another; instead, each illuminated the other’s differences. Photography, through its dependence on lighting, framing, and the flattening of material into image, compresses these distinctions. Live performance produces another way of seeing that celebrates difference, allowing material, gesture, movement, and context to assert their singularity.

Regan’s performance opened with the artist unpacking objects from a suitcase. A brief moment of contemplation crossed his face before disappearing as he allowed the material process to unfold. He carefully arranged a pair of disembodied hands in the manner of an altar, alongside other objects, including a brilliant white suit and a bondage belt. Removing the black suit and white shirt he had arrived in, he changed into the luminous white suit. Fastening the belt draped with loose chains around his waist, he lifted a flashlight. The beams from the handheld torch and the gallery’s floor light caught one another, casting temporary shadows and fragmented ghosts across the space. They moved through the gallery’s internal landscape as he shifted his body. His double never settled into a single silhouette; instead, it was repeatedly disrupted as the two light sources converged and separated. Faces seemed to emerge and dissolve, filling the room with fleeting apparitions. The quiet jangle of the chains and their intermittent reflections were ephemeral gestures that required attentive, real-time presence. These moments belonged uniquely to the live encounter and resisted documentation. For me, the fleeting dance between matter and light existed only in the shared moment between artist and audience. Even the most skilled cinematographer would struggle to capture its essence. Translating this movement for the camera alters time and space, rendering them simultaneously static and artificial. In what I refer to as “chewing gum art,” the vitality of the work can quickly dissipate, replaced by superficiality. Some moments felt historically borrowed from Regan’s bodily archive, while others embraced the immediacy of his real-time responses. I think that’s something you can feel, and you feel it less the more a work has been rehearsed or repeated in the exact same layout. I have seen performances rehearsed to death, but Regan’s work was far from that. It was a beautiful, transient dance. Its significance lay precisely in its transience: once translated into photography, it became an image rather than event, losing the temporal and sensory qualities that animated the performance.

Clare Carswell | Shim & Shim

…utterly fearless to put yourself in that type of space…

The artist opened Shim, Shim with collage pieces painted in various bright colours, cut in various shapes, the pieces left behind that have the potential to become something if all pieces came together. She wore what appeared to be old 3D cinema glasses, but instead of the familiar blue- and-red lenses, they were black. Carswell let us into her family dynamics; intimate parts of her life were revealed through stories about her mother and grandfather. Placing weight on an injured foot, she held out two inflatable seagulls in the shape of a crucifixion. The piece was complex: the actions were completely incongruent with the deeply personal stories being spoken, and this discord created an internal movement within me. Sadness rose to the surface. I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the futility of attempting to hold onto all these fragments of a life—objects that were inexpensive yet deeply sentimental. The piece cut deep because of the complexity of seeing something satirical fall onto my retinas while hearing intensely personal fragments of her life. This disjunction provoked a tragic response within me that closely aligns with Simone Weil’s idea of malheur (affliction): suffering that cannot simply be overcome or rationalised but must be endured as a fundamental part of lived experience. The effect produced here was less narratively resolved and more existentially complex. What struck me most was that this was profoundly not theatre. It contained theatrical elements, yet nothing functioned as a prop. The seagulls remained seagulls, the collage fragments remained fragments, and the injured body remained an injured body. Rather than representing something else, these materials existed on their own terms while becoming saturated with memory, grief, contradiction, and context. I found this alluring that she could take materials usually associated with comedy and return them to their bare materiality through sheer sincerity. Carswell occupied a world of her own and invited me, as well as others, into it. The fragments, much like memory itself, performed the experience of living with grief as something discontinuous and unresolved. Many autobiographical performances seek authenticity by aligning image and narrative, allowing the visual language to reinforce the spoken account. Carswell’s Shim & Shim refused to offer this closure and appeared to do the opposite. The comic absurdity of the inflatable seagulls held in the shape of a crucifix sat beside intimate stories of familial loss, producing an emotional dissonance that, most importantly, prevented people from becoming audience and settling into a passivity of either humour or melancholy. The work continually frustrates any desire to stabilise meaning, refusing the comfort of a single emotional register. It was reminiscent of tragicomedy, but without its conventional narrative arc or catharsis. When Carswell repeated the words “I am here, this is where I am meant to be,” the phrase anchored me in the present with her, intensifying the felt complexities of the human condition. Contradiction itself became the emotional ecology of the performance. As an audience, we were placed in a participatory position precisely because we were denied the comfort of choosing between laughter and grief. We had to inhabit both simultaneously.

The intensity I experienced called to mind the time I accidentally closed a heavy door on my foot, hearing the crack and laughing and crying simultaneously. Yet the sensation Carswell evoked was deeper and more enduring, an emotional state so powerful that it destabilised the boundaries between laughter and tears, articulating precisely the kind of affliction Weil theorises. Carswell managed to materialise it, and it entered other bodies. The closest I can come to describing it is the feeling I experienced when my dad physically left me. The pain was sharp, but it was inseparable from a profound sense of loss. As she spoke of her mother and grandfather’s departures, each account landed a sharp severance. As she balanced on her one uninjured foot, she took the weight of it. Yet, somehow, this grief existed alongside the absurdity of the inflatable plastic seagulls. What Carswell accomplished was entirely unexpected, using only accessible, everyday materials. I have not stopped thinking about her work since. As a working-class person, I really appreciated this live art piece. She used sparse, inexpensive materials, her body, and her history, and moved me in such a complex way that I was left astonished. I have found myself returning to her piece repeatedly over the last few days. Artist note: The glasses I wore are 35mm slides of old works from my archive – I am looking through my own work, my own story, as I perform. The drawings are fragments of unfinished works which represent the time stolen from my productivity over the years as I performed acts of survival or caring for others when I might have been making work.

After finding out that Carswell used 35mm slides to see through, it made me even more interested in her work, as she was looking through her own life and inception — which is what I really felt throughout her work, without knowing the personhood of the glasses. This is something her generation was deterred from doing. To be modest, self-reflection is “narcissism,” especially for a woman, while it’s philosophy, existential inquiry, the foundations of Western though for a man. I love her ‘fuck you’ and feminist logic in her self-determining choices! She turned a supposedly “neutral” tool into a feminist device. Slides are archival, evidentiary, and often used to catalogue others. She flipped that: I will catalogue myself. I will witness myself.

(James Perkins wrote this review alongside me. As artists know, especially live artists where you can time-travel and occupy differing spaces, it is difficult to be both inside the work and able to view it from another perspective.)

Dressed in a pristine white shirt and trousers, both crisp and pressed, Starkey removes her shoes and socks. She takes a green cardboard container of free-range eggs and offers one to every person in the gallery. This gesture operates as both an invitation and an act of care; by placing a fragile, tangible object into each audience member’s hands, Starkey initiates a direct, embodied engagement with the event. Through this act, the audience’s role shifts from passive observer to active participant, deeply involving them in the sensory and tactile rituals at the core of the performance. The offering formed a ritual in its own right; a wordless communion shaped through gesture and material, drawing the audience into participation rather than leaving them at the edges of the event.

The sound of her mother’s working-class Birmingham accent permeated and ruptured the pretence of the prestigious white gallery — an effect strengthened by the previous live artworks, which had already begun to loosen the space’s authority. Her mother’s voice, recounting the story of Starkey’s birth on a continuous loop, threaded through the performance. As the live action intertwined with the recording, the repeated words gradually shifted from language into rhythm, their meaning slipping into another atemporal, fluid formation through repetition. The weight of the words seemed to become material, taking on a physical presence within the space. Starkey throws the egg into the air, up into what the gallery calls the void. She catches it and throws the egg even higher into the void, and this time it bounces off the window frame before smashing to the floor. “I hear the sheer tension and pause within the gallery as the egg breaks open, releasing the unmistakable smell of raw egg into the brilliant white gallery. Its gooey contents spread beneath my bare feet, threading between my toes. I respond to that tension as I would a material” (Starkey, 2026). Starkey then throws fleshy beetroots into the air. Their weight and gravity shaped their movement as much as the artist’s gesture, staining her white sleeves with deep crimson. The light peering through the void caught the red outline of the beetroot. Honey slowed their descent, making time itself perceptible through the changing pace of the materials. The performance resisted cleanliness or permanence, and instead embraced contingency, where gravity, chance, and the unpredictable behaviour of materials became integral to the work. Although I instinctively avoid getting dirty or sticky, I found myself wanting to surrender to the invitation of the performance and join in. Agency was distributed between artist, audience, and matter, with each contributing to the work’s evolving form. The staining inverted and profaned Christian iconography: blood-soaked linen, the wounds of martyrdom, the Sacred Heart, and the blood of Christ marking the body. Yet here there was no promise of redemption through purity. Instead, Starkey returned these symbols to the material realities of flesh, birth and labour. Pools of egg became contaminated by red liquid, refusing any separation between the clean and the abject, the sacred and the profane. The white garment, initially suggestive of innocence, baptism or resurrection, became irrevocably marked by bodily matter, exposing whiteness not as a natural state of purity but as an ideological fiction sustained through exclusion.

I later learned that Starkey was menstruating during the performance. As she changed from the once-pristine white shirt into her everyday clothes—a transition that felt shared with the audience and continuous with the work itself—I caught sight of blood staining her white knickers. As she lifted the shirt over her head, her unshaven armpits also became visible. These fleeting yet ordinary bodily details extended the performance beyond its apparent conclusion, echoing the events’ title, Unfinished Business. There was no theatrical bow, no gesture signalling completion, and no definitive moment at which the performance was declared over. Instead, the responsibility for recognising its end was relinquished to those present. People continued watching as Starkey changed her clothes, tied her hair, and cleaned the gallery floor, attending to the pools of egg, honey, and beetroot with the same attentiveness they had given to the preceding actions. After some time, Fabyc gently reminded Starkey of the time and asked whether we could help. As a community, people gradually joined in, helping to remove the residue left across the space. Cleaning was no longer an activity that followed the performance but became part of its unfolding, extending its relational and embodied logic. The labour of restoring the space was not positioned outside the artwork but remained continuous with it, refusing the polished boundaries of the white cube and collapsing distinctions between performance and everyday labour. In refusing a singular moment of closure, Starkey rejects the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous, self-contained artwork. A void resisted the conventions of theatrical spectatorship, allowing care, maintenance and the ordinary rhythms of the body to remain part of its aesthetic and political force. Instead, the performance remains open, its meaning continuing through acts of care, maintenance and bodily labour that have historically been feminised and excluded from the category of art.

Artist note: I received the floor plan on 4th July, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that indented, asymmetrical strip where natural light cut through the architecture, the void. My whole plan shifted around it. In a moment of early-morning silence, I decided to remove the projector on the day of, letting the work settle into space rather than forcing a predetermined structure. After speaking with Deej Fabyc, I also recognised that the piece didn’t need to anchor itself to a male artist — the white gallery is already carrying its own loaded patriarchal history. She agreed and that conversation helped affirm my decision.

Similarities point out razor-sharp difference(s)

Although Regan and Starkey wore similarly pristine white clothing within the same white gallery space, the differences between their performances became increasingly profound. At first glance, their visual appearance suggested a formal similarity; however, as the works unfolded, their distinct material and emotional languages emerged. To my surprise, this initial resemblance only served to illuminate their differences more clearly. The closest comparison I can make is when emulsion wall paint accidentally gets on wood paint, like a wooden door frame; the two whites highlight each other’s differences in texture, appearance, etc. Their whiteness initially suggested a formal similarity; at first, they appear identical, yet the subtle differences become more noticeable the longer you remain present. In a photograph, these distinctions might disappear entirely, flattened into a single representation of white, but in person, the relative component is unmistakable. The material encounter reveals what the image conceals. Another analogy comes to mind: two violins may both be immediately recognisable as violins, yet their bodies, construction and histories differ, shaping the voices they produce. Performance operates in a similar way. Two artists may appear to work with comparable materials or visual languages, yet their bodies, lived experiences, and relationships to those materials transform the meaning of the work. The surface may appear similar, but the embodied encounter reveals entirely different registers of feeling, agency, relation and presence. Performance operates in a similar way. Two artists may appear to work with comparable materials or visual languages, yet their bodies, lived experiences, histories, gestures, and relationships to those materials fundamentally shape the work that emerges. The way Regan and Starkey moved through the space, inhabited their bodies, and incorporated sound made each performance distinctly its own. Their apparent visual similarities did not produce sameness; instead, they revealed how profoundly live art is shaped by the singular body that enacts it.

Mariya Hoyin | Never Again

Hoyin began by opening a video artwork she had created in 2022 while participating in a residency for Ukrainian female artists in Ustka, Poland, on her laptop. Placing her phone on the floor, the movements organic and in natural flow, this invites us in as we are experiencing the work at the same time she is. Hoyin calls out to the audience and lets them know that they can move around and get closer. She places the tinfoil in her mouth. It functions as a temporary gag, whilst emptying toy soldiers from a grocery bag, both green and yellow, onto the floor. The colour choice is exceptional, as these aren’t disparate colours, which indicates they are part of the same humanity and are not inherently oppositional. Their little bodies scattered on the floor, the sound of clothes pegs falling onto concrete.

The soldiers appear on screen as shadowy silhouettes and water gliding under their feet. Ukrainian writing appears on screen. Save Ukraine appears on screen. The ambiguous sounds of helicopters and what appears to be city traffic, the indecipherable sounds fluctuating. The soldiers are slowly and tentatively placed into a number: 1599. This is how many days the Ukrainian war has been ongoing. It’s incredibly painful to see that number in the form of toys meant for children, and it brought notice to the actual toys. It made me question why on earth children can play with soldiers in the first place and how morbid this manufacturing is. The choice of handheld devices was a brilliant one, as it reflected the way millions of people around the world first encountered news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By showcasing her own artistic material, Hoyin collapses the distance between mediation and intimate experience.

She resisted the temptation to sensationalise the event by projecting large images across the gallery. This restraint was impeccable. By keeping the video confined to a laptop screen, Hoyin drew the audience physically closer, creating an intimate encounter with a global catastrophe. Slowly unravelling tin foil over her head, whilst a monotone sound peered through. She blew the tinfoil; it felt like the calm of a blind lifting under a slight breeze, fluttering, an ordinary moment. She then crushed the foil over her face, an abrupt end to calmness and the simplicity of everyday life. The foil unravelled and spread across the gallery; the weight of its own materiality drove the foil.

Using LED strobes and tin foil, Hoyin transformed mediated violence into something tangible. As she pressed the tin foil against her face, the metallic crackling pierced through the gallery. Gradually, she produced a series of delicate casts of her own face, each one carrying the imprint of pressure and fragility. With each casting, her breathing became denser and harsher as the material functioned simultaneously as a shield but also a clasp. As Hoyin read personal entries and consumed them—chewing the verses and swallowing them—it reminded me that the body can gather immaterial weight, violence as a physical ingestion.

Hoyin’s piece is a quiet, embodied critique of how global conflict enters domestic space. By using a laptop and tin foil, she demonstrates how mediated violence becomes physical, how news can become inseparable from weaponry, and how the body comes to carry the metallic residue of distant war. The foil resembled shrapnel, yet it also functioned as a fragile archive, preserving the contours of her face while bearing the traces of violence that had travelled through the screen.

As she wrapped her face in the tin foil, hearing the metal distort and mould itself around her skin was gripping. The repeated making of facial castings became both an act of witnessing and of endurance, revealing how distant conflict can leave intimate and lasting impressions upon the body.

Love & Respect

It’s an ongoing practice to resist the colonial urge taught as early as primary school possibly even prior, to stay with difference, rather than reaching for familiar… Stay with the discomfort of not knowing…This practice asks us to stay with difference, resisting the impulse to immediately interpret, categorise, or possess what we encounter… recognising that uncertainty does not require overcoming but a condition through which other forms of knowledge can emerge. In this sense, witnessing is an ethical practice of attention: one that values relation over certainty, curiosity over mastery, and attunement over control. The gestures within Hoyin’s performance unexpectedly recalled Lee Hassall’s performance More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse Ekphrasis Tour (2024) presented as part of Replay the Replay at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), in which Hassall gently pressed lightly tanned paper into his face while recounting memories of his father.

At first glance, both performances shared a strikingly similar action: the repeated pressing of a material against the face. As this recall surfaced and the urge came to shortcut one performance for another, I consciously resisted it. Remaining with the encounter rather than seeking immediate comparison revealed how profoundly different the works were. Remaining, in this sense, requires care, love, respect, and patience. A deceleration of capitalist time. It resists the colonial impulse to flatten difference into sameness by refusing premature conclusions and allowing each work to disclose its own relational, material, and affective specificity. The distinction emerged not through the action itself but through each artist’s material, sonic, and political choices. Hoyin’s metallic foil crackled with an unsettling sharpness, carrying associations of shrapnel, surveillance, and the mediated violence of war. Hassall’s paper, by contrast, held a quiet softness, its delicate impressions unfolding through memory, intimacy, a longing and familial grief. Although the bodily gesture was comparable, the performances produced entirely different sensory and affective experiences. I can still recall the sounds of both works, yet they remain distinct within my memory, each carrying its own material logic and emotional register. To place photographs of these performances side by side as evidence of similarity would risk reproducing what I have identified elsewhere in this review as an ocularcentric and colonial strategy, one that privileges visual resemblance while flattening difference into sameness (Jay, 1994; Rose, 2001). Such a comparison would overlook the embodied, sonic, temporal, and relational qualities through which each work generated meaning. Following my (2023) notion of dancing-with, similarity here does not diminish originality. Rather, it enables difference to become more perceptible. The shared gesture becomes the point from which each artist’s singular material, political, and affective decisions emerge more clearly.

Resisting the familiar compare-and-contrast framework inherited through Western educational traditions, I do not position one work against the other in competition. Instead, witnessing them alongside one another demonstrates that originality does not reside in inventing entirely new actions but in the distinctive relationships each artist establishes between body, material, sound, memory, and politics. Their apparent resemblance therefore becomes a means of deepening, rather than erasing, their differences.

Duniam’s film, To lay my body on mosses green,(2023) a site-specific performance during SOIL Residency at LAI was presented on a large cinema screen, which I again felt was an insightful and thoughtful curatorial decision by Fabyc. Seeing a body that is so often excluded from the cinematic frame was deeply impactful. Duniam’s graceful movements, accompanied by ambient natural sounds, created an intimate and immersive experience. The way the natural light sculpted both their body and the moss further emphasised the work’s connection to the landscape, blurring the boundaries between the human and the natural world. Visible surgical scars beneath Duniam’s chest became an integral part of the work’s visual language. Rather than being concealed, they were presented with quiet confidence, resisting normative ideals of the body and expanding the possibilities of who is seen and represented on screen. Their presence contributed to the work’s emotional resonance, reinforcing themes of embodiment, witchery, sexuality, and transformation. There was a palpable surge of energy that emanated from duniam. A raw fire. Unbridled, and as unforgiving as nature itself. Their movements sinewy, an investigation of the natural environment both within their self and around them; deeply sensual, exuding an embodied intimacy while embracing an uninhibited sexuality. As they moved through the landscape, a faint metallic clang accompanied their gestures. The sound functioned as a subtle rupture within the otherwise organic soundscape, momentarily interrupting the tranquility of birdsong and wind. Rather than disrupting the work, this metallic resonance heightened an awareness of the body’s materiality, creating tension between the natural environment and the presence of something forged or carried. An untamed knowledge carried through their body.

The work occupied a compelling space between sensuality and sexuality, inviting desire and vulnerability while resisting spectacle. This delicate balance challenged conventional representations of the body, allowing sensuality to emerge through presence, varied movement and tactile engagement with the natural environment rather than through objectification.

Fable Lane

The band starts with a male singer on guitar. His low tones settle the atmosphere, creating a sense of calm, only to be hit with the female singer, her voice divinity without religion. Together, their voices complemented one another beautifully, balancing a husky warmth with a piercing depth. The lyrics were profoundly personal and deeply affecting. They seemed to speak to a kind of love that is rarely expressed: when one person truly sees the inner beauty of another and, rather than feeling threatened by it, chooses to nurture it. Her voice traveled through me like vibrations moving through blood, resonating in every part of my body. I found myself unable to hold back tears, instinctively reaching for my partner’s hand. Their music seemed to loosen something that had long been held in my body, releasing tension through trembling. I wasn’t the only one touched by the dynamic and sound of Fable Lane; water seemed to express from people’s faces as though they too had held on for a little too long. It was a performance that transformed listening into a deeply embodied and emotional experience — one that was felt as much in the body as it was heard by the ears. The band reminded me that life is far more than a concrete jungle, the rat race, and the relentless pursuit of status that so often has people climbing over one another. Somewhere in the small openings, in quiet moments of connection, our humanity still exists, awaiting remembrance.

Jack Keeshan

Jack Keeshan performed alongside Edel Pender on harmonica, creating a set that felt rooted in locality and storytelling. Instead of pursuing grandeur, the performance derived its strength from attention to place, revealing how social and political landscapes are experienced and embodied – lived in and through the body. The songs unfolded like poems, drawing on the textures of everyday life and transforming familiar landscapes into something reflective and resonant. Pender’s harmonica introduced a plaintive, weathered quality that evoked memory and expansive landscapes, while Keeshan’s voice carried the intimacy of spoken poetry. Together, they created a dialogue between music and language in which each song felt less like a performance and more like a shared recollection. There was a created intimacy entrusted with someone’s memories. By the end of the set, the Republic of Ireland felt less like a distant place and more like something emotionally close.

Throughout the performance, Keeshan interwove reflections on mental health and witnessing his friend’s suffering, suggesting that the body bears the burdens of history in much the same way as the land itself. He described how these historical and personal struggles became internalised and how he navigated coping with them. This aspect of the performance acted as a much-needed catharsis, resonating with me, and encouraging the release of my own emotional weight. Rather than depicting place as a mere backdrop, Keeshan revealed it as an active force in shaping identity, memory, and wellbeing. The songs were honest and vulnerable, which made me feel less alone. Furthermore, by addressing the unattainability of performative masculinity, Keeshan’s work dismantled those facades and harmful representations, allowing the audience to witness his inner complexities.

Witnessing Difference, Witnessing Differently

One of the most thoughtful aspects of Unfinished Business was the way it created space for multiple ways of witnessing. Rather than assuming there is one correct way to experience live art, the event welcomed different rhythms of attention, perception, and participation. As someone who is neurodivergent, I felt this immediately. For example, dimmed lighting and minimal background noise between performances reduced sensory overload for those sensitive to sound or light. Quiet spaces were set up just outside the main gallery for neurodivergent and disabled participants to step away and regulate, returning to the event on their own terms. There was no expectation to remain seated or silent; audience members were free to move, fidget, or take breaks without judgment. I never felt pressured to perform spectatorship in a prescribed way. Instead, I was invited to remain with the works on my own terms, allowing them to unfold gradually through sound, touch, smell, movement, texture, memory, and relation. This openness extended beyond sensory experience. Audience members were invited into encounters without obligation. Sandra Corrigan Breathnach gently guided each participant’s hand rather than surrendering agency. Emma Starkey offered everyone an egg, inviting participation without demanding it, while the cleaning that followed her performance became a collective act of care rather than labour hidden from view. These gestures respected individual agency while allowing people to participate as much or as little as they wished. Carswell’s SHIM & SHIM and Keeshan’s set of numerous songs such as Roscrea Sky and Johnny offer a compelling demonstration of how personal narrative can lead a work without collapsing into sameness. Both artists foregrounded intimate histories—Carswell through stories of her mother and grandfather, and Keeshan through songs that “felt less like a performance and more like a shared recollection,” creating “a dialogue between music and language” that carried “the intimacy of spoken poetry”. Yet witnessing them in the same event made their differences razor-sharp. Carswell’s performance produced an affective dissonance: the “satirical” visual actions of inflatable seagulls collided with “intensely personal fragments of her life,” generating a complex emotional state that aligned with Weil’s notion of malheur—a destabilising mixture of grief, absurdity, and endurance. Keeshan, by contrast, cultivated a quieter, steadier form of vulnerability. His songs unfolded through locality, memory, and embodied storytelling, creating “a set that felt rooted in place” and evoking a sense of shared belonging rather than existential rupture. Witnessing these works relationally reveals that personal narrative is not a singular mode but a spectrum of affective, material, and political orientations. Their proximity does not blur their differences; it heightens them, demonstrating how empathic attention allows each artist’s distinct emotional register to emerge without comparison or hierarchy. Duniam’s film/performance further expanded this field of relational witnessing by offering yet another mode through which the personal becomes perceptible without becoming universal. Duniam’s work moved through a distinctly queer, sensorial, and politically charged register.

Their gestures and environmental choices articulated a form of personal narrative shaped by refusal and embodied defiance. Rather than inviting the audience into a shared emotional landscape, Duniam created conditions in which difference was felt through tension and deliberate disruption of normative expectations around identity and expression through sound. Witnessing Duniam’s work in the same event as Carswell and Keeshan made it clear that the ‘same’ event was one that was ever evolving, that personal narrative is not a singular affective mode but a constellation of orientations. Each artist mobilised the personal differently, and it was precisely through empathic attention and witnessing that these differences became sharply perceptible.

The event also resisted the urgency that so often structures galleries and institutions. Performances were not rushed towards neat conclusions. Instead, they lingered, allowing uncertainty, silence, and incompleteness to remain present. Remaining with the work required patience, care, love, and respect. It asked us to slow down and resist the colonial impulse to flatten difference into sameness through immediate interpretation or comparison.

For me, this was what made the event genuinely inclusive. Inclusion did not emerge through accommodation alone but through a relational ethos that recognised there are many ways of sensing, processing, remembering, and understanding. Rather than privileging a single mode of attention, Unfinished Business made room for difference to exist without asking it to justify itself or become the same as everything else, Thank you Deej Fabyc!

Somewhat of a bleeding endnote:

In synthesising my argument, I contend that originality and knowledge should not be viewed as fixed or individual attributes, but rather as phenomena that develop through ongoing relational processes and embodied encounters. My analysis specifically questions dominant narratives in scholarship that locate originality solely within individual authorship or singular acts of creation. Instead, I maintain that originality materialises as a co-constituted phenomenon, generated through collective, embodied witnessing and the dynamic interplay of difference within live art contexts. Within institutions shaped by disparate distributions of power and visibility, such as universities and art galleries, originality is frequently constructed as individual intellectual property, codified through authorship and publication. By centering relationality, process, and the situatedness of encounter, my research advances a de-colonial perspective that opens space for continuous negotiation and transformation. Ultimately, I argue that Unfinished Business suggests originality can emerge through shared presence, collaborative practice, and a critical refusal to reproduce inherited hierarchies. This approach offers a necessary alternative to prevailing scholarly models, underscoring that originality is an evolving, collective achievement rather than a static or solely individual one.

The performances presented in Unfinished Business (2026) proposed an alternative, de-colonial mode of relation. Through the intersection of live art and music, and through their insistence on material, sensory, and temporal experience, they demonstrated how knowledge can be constituted through exchanges between bodies, objects, environments, and audiences. Within the context of Unfinished Business, originality emerges not as singular or proprietary but as relational. It is cultivated through attention, respect, contingency, and acts of witnessing. The event functioned less as a conventional showcase and more as a fluid, ongoing inquiry that amplified difference rather than subsuming it into sameness. It fostered an intentionally inclusive and accessible environment—one that actively considered the diverse ways in which individuals, including neurodivergent participants like myself, engage with and experience the world. By prioritising sensory variety, flexibility in participation, and a welcoming ethos, the space enabled multiple forms of engagement and understanding. Performance unfolded as an encounter, and the ‘unfinished’ was not approached as a problem to be resolved, but rather as an ongoing, ever- evolving dialogue that honoured diverse modes of perception and participation. Such nuances are subtle, but they should not be deemed “less rigorous.” Nuances are delicate, beautiful fingerprints that each person is capable of perceiving and producing. As part of my ongoing investigation into accessible and inclusive art, I argue that we should hold these differences delicately rather than diminish them.

I have learned from this event to trust independent agency and the power of refusal, drawing here on the work of bell hooks, Breny Mendoza, and Sara Ahmed. hooks’ writing on love, pedagogy and liberation reminds us that care, critical reflection, and education are inseparable from the work of transformation. Mendoza’s decolonial feminist thinking challenges the colonial systems that determine whose knowledge, bodies, and experiences are recognised as valuable, while Ahmed’s writing on refusal and willfulness demonstrates how resistance can become a generative practice rather than simply an act of opposition. I encourage readers to explore their work further, alongside the many resources they offer, as these ideas continue to develop through collective engagement and critical reflection. I recognise the irony in using the same referencing structures that emerge from Western academic traditions and systems of knowledge production. This is something I have deliberately resisted throughout this review. However, I have chosen to include references for several reasons. Firstly, I want to provide readers with points of access to the ideas, histories, and thinkers that have informed my work—especially for those who have also had to navigate systems that attempt to erase, diminish, or silence them. Secondly, referencing creates an opportunity to foster dialogue and share resources, which aligns with my commitment to relational, inclusive, and decolonial methodologies. By clearly acknowledging these sources, I hope to subvert the idea of authority as a singular or closed system, instead demonstrating that knowledge emerges through encounter, exchange, and critical engagement. I understand the internal violence that can be produced through these encounters, and I would not wish that experience upon anyone. For me, referencing becomes a way of creating connection and access, while still questioning the very structures through which knowledge is often legitimised.

The resources included here are offered not as fixed authorities, but as invitations to continue questioning, learning, and expanding the ways in which knowledge can be encountered. I hope they provide points of connection for those who have experienced exclusion within dominant systems of recognition and value.

Appreciation to Live Art Ireland and The Source Arts Centre Thurles:

I want to express my deep appreciation to Live Art Ireland and The Source Arts Centre Thurles. After three years of enduring institutional violence, this opportunity was a genuine retreat. My heartfelt thanks to Deej Fabyc, Joanna Ryan-Purcell, Zoé Marzeau, Lison Degrave, Brendan Maher, Annie Ryan, and Brendan Cahill. I really appreciate your help on the day Brendan Cahill! Thank you for inviting me to such a special event and holding space for my practice at a moment when I truly needed it.

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2021) Complaint!. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Carswell, C. (2026) SHIM & SHIM. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11 July.

Corrigan Breathnach, S.C. (2026) Trust. Live performance. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11 July.

duniam, l. (2023) to lay my body on mosses green. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, Viewed in person

11 July (2026).

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.

Fabyc, D. (2018) Selected Works. Available at: https://www.deejfabyc.com (Accessed: 14 July

2026).

Fabyc, D. (2020) Trauma, Memory, and Performance. London: Live Art Development Agency.

Fabyc, D. (2026) Unfinished Business Curation. Live Art Ireland, Thurles.

Fabyc, D. (2026) Curatorial statement for Unfinished Business. Exhibition programme. Live Art

Ireland, Thurles, Ireland.*

Hassall, L. (2024) More Than a Passing Pleasure: Re-playing Dorothy Wordsworth, a Reverse

Ekphrasis Tour. Live performance. Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York:

Routledge.

hooks, b. (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End

Press.

Hoyin, M. (2026) Never again (tin foil, laptop, news broadcast). Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11

July.Review made by Emma Starkey

As part of her ongoing PhD inquiry: Rupturing Object White

14.07.2026

22

Jay, M. (1994) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French

Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keeshan, J. (2026) Live music performance. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11 July.

Lane, F. (2026) Live music performance. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11 July.

Live Art Ireland (2026) Unfinished Business. Tipperary: Live Art Ireland Press.

Mendoza, B. (2002) Ensayos de crítica feminista en nuestra América. Managua: Editorial

Hispamer.

Mendoza, B. (2014) ‘Transnational Feminisms and the Struggle for Global Justice’, Journal of

Feminist Scholarship, 6(1), pp. 1–18.

Mendoza, B. (2016) ‘Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality’,

in Lugones, M.L. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. London: Palgrave

Macmillan, pp. 59–74.

Moten, F. (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Regan, P. (2026) Untitled performance. Live Art Ireland, Thurles, 11 July.

Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials.

London: Sage.

Starkey, E. (2013) Construct Me. Live performance. Garage, Worcester.

Starkey, E. (2023) Dancing-With: Methodologies of Entanglement in Live Art. Doctoral

Research. University of Gloucestershire.

Starkey, E. (2018) Dance with/in. Artist statement research. Published online. BIO | emma

starkey

Starkey, E. (2026) A void (egg, beetroot, honey). Unfinished Business, Live Art Ireland. Thurles,

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Weil, S. (1952) Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge & Kegan PaulReview made by Emma Starkey

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Additional reading list:

Ahmed, S. (2023) The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. London: Allen Lane.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute

Books.

Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press.

hooks, b. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the

Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Lugones, M. (2010) ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia, 25(4), pp. 742–759.

Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Muñoz, J.E. (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New

York University Press.

Puwar, N. (2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg.

Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge.

Smith, L.T. (2021) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd edn.

London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012) ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity,

Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1–40.

Weheliye, A.G. (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black

Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.