June at Sirius Arts Centre Cobh

 

Ciara Rodgers Green Mouth The artist Ciara Rodgers makes drawings, photographs, installations, and performances reflecting on her experiences of the built environment. Her work is often site-specific and informed by embodied research into architecture and territory. In her drawings, Rodgers often uses charcoal to capture her gestures—a direct experience of her physical and psychological state in space. The performative nature of the making process fluidly documents her body’s movements and lends itself to an audience engagement. Rodgers’s commissioned, newly created performance Green Mouth responds to both the building that SIRIUS is housed in and narratives around the late artist Brian O’Doherty. SIRIUS occupies the former clubhouse of the Royal Cork Yacht Club, and O’Doherty created the mural One, Here, Now while he was an artist in residence there in 1996. The building, constructed in 1855, was an initiative of the Anglo-Irish elite, and O’Doherty’s work was a gesture toward reclaiming it from that connection. Green Mouth is commissioned by SIRIUS. The presentation is produced by SIRIUS and curated by Miguel Amado, Director. The presentation of Green Mouth occurs at SIRIUS on Saturday, 10 June, from 5pm to 6pm (free; no booking required).

Ciara Rodgers, production still for Green Mouth, 2023. Performance, 60 minutes. Commissioned by SIRIUS. Photograph: the artist. Courtesy of the artist

Rodgers engages with the lingering presences that continue to permeate our encounters with the building and O’Doherty’s legacy. As a young boy, O’Doherty’s elderly aunt recounted to him how, in her youth, she had seen people with green mouths, pigmented from eating grass during the Great Famine (1845–52), a catastrophic result of the British Empire’s stranglehold. Prompted by this intense imagery, Green Mouth is an interrogation into the psychological “staining” of such events on both our environment and our psyches. Green Mouth has two distinct sections. In the first, developed over the period of a week, we see Rodgers utilizing canvas to create charcoal rubbings directly from the building. This phase is a recording of the artist’s research into the site’s material infrastructure. In the second section, Rodgers turns these canvases into a traditional Irish cloak and dons it, thereby literally embodying the building by transforming its features into a garment. She then grinds down grass with a mortar and pestle and consumes it while staring out to sea. Green Mouth considers the societal inequalities symbolized by the building’s complex heritage. It also provides an interesting commentary on the female body. The cloak is a recurring symbol in Irish folklore and references invisibility, goddesses, and the cailleach, the divine hag associated with the land. The performance, with its seaside setting, plays with the forlorn imagery associated with the archetypical figure of Mother Ireland, and powerfully examines previously unwelcome facets of society: women, farm laborers, and the natural world.

Ciara Rodgers. Source: the artist.

Sirius Arts Centre The Old Yacht Club Westbourne Place Cobh, Co. Cork P24 F209 Ireland siriusartscentre.ie Opening hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 12:00 - 17:00