Performance

Milford House is a heritage mansion in Co Tipperary comprising many rooms with stunning Georgian features and a number of luscious halls, that are ideal for use for rehearsal and practice of performance. The house is set in 17 acres of undulating land,  equally impressive, with well established trees, vegetable gardens and meadows.

It was in these memorable settings that curator and artist Deej Fabyc, CEO of Live Art Ireland, ran a three day event, following an open call and a selection process. I was delighted to be selected and to participate in the workshops and in the performance, which gave me the opportunity to meet and work with some of Ireland’s most interesting performance artists. The experience of spending time in the house, surrounded by the supportive and inspiring company of all participants and facilitators, was invaluable and it will no doubt give rise to more collaborations in the future. All aspects of the work were deeply grounded in a practical awareness of the environment in general and of the ecology within the site in particular. A simple but strong ethical awareness framed the experience and the work. Thank you to Deej and to all collaborators for an unforgettable experience.

 was funded by The Arts Council of Ireland.

Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Co Tipperary, Ireland

Be-coming Tree

Audiovisual

Poetry

In May of 2023, our friend Paul Swan launched his first book of poems at The Patriot’s Inn, in Inchicore, as part of the yearly Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival.

Paul invited me, and two other artist friends, to contribute a work to the launch.

I selected a poignant poem from Paul’s book; L’Etranger. As a perennial foreigner, the poem’s thematic felt close to home. The growing atmosphere of nationalism and racism both in Ireland and world wide, together with the tragic ongoing deaths of migrants at sea, especially in my home country of Italy and in Greece, (where authorities often allow for these drownings to happen and humanitarian workers rescuing refugees from death by drowning are prosecuted), made this poem particularly important to me.

I performed in the pub and the whole night was a powerful experience, but the light conditions in the venue made video recording of the event impossible.

My son suggested making a version of the performance for video, possibly outdoors, by the sea.

Paul Swan enlisted the help of videographer Joey Cleary and with the help of my husband Nigel Wood, we filmed the performance in Curracloe beach, in Co wexford.

The video file lay in wait for some time, until recently, during a conversation with  friend and fellow artist, Marco Gutierrez, he offered to edit the video. Marco’s work goes beyond technical editing, his arts background and practice brings an aesthetic awareness to the work and he contributed with editing decisions which have enhanced the outcome.

It is to be noted that all working on this project are doing so on a voluntary basis. My gratitude to Paul, Joey, Nigel and Marco for their invaluable work in the making of this new performance video, which has yet to be exhibited publicly.

The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival, The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

L’Etranger

Paola Catizone, with visitor participation.

Installation

Collaboration

For the Peatlands Project exhibition at Castletown House, Paola Catizone facilitated two movement workshops, aimed at exploring the parallels between the human body and the body of the planet. 

Through experiential anatomy, breathwork, movement games, meditation and discussion, Paola supported participants in gaining awareness of the fluid systems in the body in relation to the complex inter-connectedness of all physical systems.There was an emphasis on interconnectedness as the underlying principle in the living world. 

Catizone also built a shadow installation in Castletown House's stables, using lights, found and organic objects and pre-crafted recycled plastic.

She invited members of the public to draw and cut out their images which were then added to the shadow installation in response to the Peatlands project. The workshops and shadow play animated the space and fomented public engagement and discussion.

For IMMAs’ Earth Rising Festival 2023, Catizone developed the two movement workshops to include extra time for the crafting of a performance. Catizone invited five artists to participate in the performance and held a number of online discussions with them in order to give information on the peatlands and on the performance concept.

The discussions also invited participants to contribute their images and ideas. Catizone ‘s work includes relational Art processes, where discussion and co-creation are encouraged. 

With minimal time available for performance practice (which only took place at the end of the two workshops and online) Catizone invited performers to improvise and to bring their area of specialisation to the fore.

,  became a ritual of healing for the Irish Peatlands and it included poetry readings, drawing, chanting, movement and dance. 

Bodyscapes was filmed in full and the resulting video will be screened at the opening of The Peatlands Project at Birr Castle on the 9th of November of 2023.

Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House

Copper Tree Gallery, Birr Castle Demesne, Birr, County Offaly

The Peatlands Project: Birr Castle

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Earth Rising

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House, Earth Rising & Birr Castle

Bodyscapes

Thunderous Silence takes its name from a Buddhist notion; the potentiality of all sounds being inherent in apparent silence. Both Thunderous silence and luminous void  refer to an "empty fullness" in Buddhist philosophy.

In this short audio piece, the artists summon nature through its sounds, layering it with human voice and everyday sounds to create a "wave", rising from gentle to culminate in a fierce, thunderous auditory cacophony....and back down to silence.

In the historical setting of Fossanova, this work proposes a dialogue between nature and culture, human and non-human, male and female. 

There is a nod to the figure of Thomas Aquinas, and to his terror of thunder and lightning. The artists suggest that a fear of nature and of the feminine underly much of the western cultural canon, and present us, in this work, with the power and the awe inspiring presence of the physical, natural world.

A series of discussions with Brendan Fox in Dublin stimulated ideas — Catizone used a 14 metres long fluorescent green piece of fabric. She constructed a simple tunic, with a long train, to be used at the Giulianello lake.

Nigel Wood selected a soundtrack for the performance; 30 minutes of music primarily from the traditions of trance Italian music, such as Taranta as well as electronic music and mournful ballads. The sound track was subdivided into: Music for the forest, to be played during the procession-like walk through the beautiful forest before arriving at the lake, and then music for the lake.

Giulianello lake was the setting of a singular filming of 

, by Helios film company from Velletri, where a large number of local people acted as extras in an epic movie that evoked Bosh’s 

, which her grandmother used to read to her, were stirred by this. The performance took place in the rain, on the one and only rainy day in Lazio during July ’23. Despite this, people turned up, and followed as if in a procession. 

Walking through the forest was followed by full immersion in the water. The artist engaged in movements that evoked local old trades and domestic occupation: Fishing, washing clothes in the lake.

The public's response was generous and affectionate, with many reporting that memories of grandparents at work had been evoked.

Giulianello lake was retrieved by a group of citizens a few years ago from private ownership and returned to the people and to nature. It is now a protected natural area with wild boar, birds and water snakes.

The project was, in the words of Brendan Fox, an “artistic homecoming” for me. Driving around the Roman countryside and visiting places I used to frequent with my family as a child was deeply evocative and healing, allowing me to mend a partially lost and fractured relationship with my beloved country of origin, in particular with Rome, my birth city, and its countryside.

That this homecoming was mediated through my art- making and collaborations, personally resonates in many meaningful ways. The work that resulted from this convergence of past and present is documented here.

The performance was a ritual of celebration of place, memory, people and nature.

Lazio, Italy

Sleepertown Art Trail

Sleepertown, Fossanova Abbey and Lago di Giulianello, Lazio, Italy

Thunderous Silence

Ecosocial

Sculpture

The melting of ice caps marks the time of our planets’ transformation. Grief about the loss of majestic icebergs is part of our collective grief for the loss of our natural expectations of our future life on the planet. The inexorability of time frames this work.

This video records a recent performance at IMMA, as part of the 

Wearing a wetsuit under a hand felted dress, and using layers of felt, lanolin and other natural fats (a nod to Joseph Beuys and to Siberian Shamans), the artist plays with large blocks of ice.

Holding, carrying, moving from location to location. The balancing of ice on the head references the gestures of African water carriers. The pushing and dragging of the blue-died ice along the ground creates watery marks, a sort of embodied, ephemeral drawing through the public site.

Most of the time, an immediate response to materials, body and site dictates the actions.

A quiet presence through the busy festival, Qanuk offered visitors fleeting encounters with the process and the images it engendered. The performance engaged with ice, body, water and time. Its duration, two hours approximately, was dictated by the time the ice took to melt.

Qanuk is a work in progress and the artist is developing new iterations.

Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Tipperary, Ireland & Online

Alive & Kicking

Earth Rising, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Qanuk Snowflake

Course content, Programme design and facilitation

Kerry Co Council first artist in residence

“Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole” 

The Breaking Cover Collective (BCC), is a group of arts professionals, educators, healers and activists.

Its vision is to activate the power of performance art to communicate the urgency of the ecological crisis and to re-enchant our relations to Earth and the wider community of life. The collective aims to propose participatory performative actions as catalysts for eco-social change.

Central to the ethos of the BCC is the idea that art, and performance art in particular, is uniquely placed to communicate the reality of the ecological emergency.

The BCC is inter- generational, fostering exchange of diverse knowledges and experiences.  It acknowledges the elders, indigenous people of many countries, our ancestors at the frontline of eco-social resistance. A relational and dialogical ethos as well as a favoring of embodied thinking, refusing to focus on intellectual discourse alone, underlies the group’s art processes.

The collective was initiated by artist Paola Catizone with the support of IMMA between 2020-21. Catizone ran some pilot workshops  in 2020 and then designed, coordinated and facilitated Breaking Cover, Art and Ecology Encounters, a six month programme on ecology and performance art at IMMA, which was attended by over 50 people in 2021.The programme title referred to the 2020-21 lockdowns, when humans stepped back and nature seemed to break cover.

At the end of the course, a group of 15 participating artists formed and worked collaboratively to present a two hour performance in the grounds of IMMA, in September of 2021, curated by Catizone.

These were born from the tension in the group between individuality and  inter-connectedness. This tension was part of the group's discussions through the course and found its way into the work.

The heart of the performance was not visible, and even esoteric: Musician/ Sculptor Thomas Duffy made and assembled a drum in the IMMA courtyard during his solo piece. Within the drum each performer wrote their intentions; the spiritual drive behind the making of this work. Thomas' drum called the group to the IMMA courtyard after the solo performances. From there, the group  walked in a slow procession to the formal gardens, holding their intentions in mind, and viewers followed.  A woman reported  later how walking slowly along, to the pace of the drum, had come naturally to her.

In the formal gardens, Catizone and Carmel Ennis (Garden Artist) had set up a large banquet table. They decorated it with herbs, plant die, animal skulls. After a spoken word piece by Deirdre Lane, focussing on the bogland (Mind me, don't mine me), the formal looking event degenerated into chaos; the group toasted and then poured the multicolored drinks onto the table and then served the meal by emptying three wheelbarrows of earth, (kindly supplied by OPW gardener Mary Condron), onto plates, which were soon overfilled and spilled onto the table, to the sound of "More!". They added electrical and plastic waste and this became layered with more earth, which now resembled a landfill, a tomb..Excessive consumption was the theme of the banquet, and some viewers later expressed that feelings of grief and shame had overwhelmed them while watching.

As the once pretty banquet table transformed into a monument to human excess, a keening sound (By Hillary Willians and Catizone), prompted the group's migration towards the meadow. There, XR activist/artist Thomas Morelly, armed with his megaphone (Courtesy of XR Dublin) called out the names of extinct species. The artists fell and rose, dying over and over again, until the last creature, the extinct dodo, was called and everything came to stillness. 

The closing gesture of the event represented hope: Catizone lit a small candle in a lantern and the group  walked back to IMMA's Studio 10, with viewers following. A spontaneous Q&A session took place there.

The BCC  continued to collaborate. They produced and presented  a three day programme of individual and group performances and interventions, at 

Earth Rising, IMMA’s first Ecology and Art Festival

The Breaking Cover Programme and the BCC will be included in an upcoming publication : Artist Led Organisations In Ireland, by Megs Morley

IMMA Outdoors

IMMA Outdoors, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Breaking Cover

Water pollution, especially by plastic, is a recurring theme in Catizone’s work.

Light, Plastic, Water, a video previously created by Catizone and featuring a sound track by Robin Sherry Wood

For Sculpture in Context 2018, in Dublin’s Botanical Gardens, Catizone displayed Light, Plastic, Water video and soundtrack, as well as her sculptural works, made with up-cycled plastic to create an immersive environment.

The series of three performances sought to activate the space with a necessary sense of loss for our diminished environment and also with play and hope for appropriate action. Participants were invited to observe, to follow in a procession to the stream, where an old bottle of holy water, found in an abandoned house, was poured into the living water running through the Gardens. Viewers were then invited to return to the exhibition space for a conversation on our experiences of the ecological crisis.

The use of UV light during the performance referred  to the fluorescence  of deep sea creatures. Lists of names of extinct and at risk water flora and fauna were written in ultraviolet ink and were sourced from the Marine Life section of the 

The artist adopted the persona of Grandmother Water which allowed her to embody concern for  future generations on this planet.  The symbiotic relationship between the human body and water  ( cellular, inter cellular, lymph, blood, cerebro-spinal, synovial fluids  etc....) were explored during the movement sequences in the performances.

Most people worry about the planet, allowing open discussion and a ritualised set of gestures facilitated the groups to connect to feelings of sadness, grief  and fear. This emotional awareness is the foundation of all ecological activism, whether through art or direct action.

The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Sculpture in Context

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Being Water

Catizone and DJ Nigel Wood were  invited to perform together at the Body & Soul festival 2017.

Artist and DJ collaborated by listening  to a lot of music together and choosing a two hour worth of trance inducing, ferocious ethnic sounds.  In the  live performance, Catizone  moved  uninterruptedly  while drawing with two hands and using UV markers and UV lights,  to “draw with light” on a large sheet of paper on board.

The resulting drawing is a record of movement and of the sound that prompted it.

It was the end of the solstice and the artist ritualised the performance,  burning sage and marking the four directions, and using animal skulls, plants and other power objects.

In the magic of the Pagoda woodland area at Body & Soul, a crowd gathered to watch, dance and celebrate.

Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Body & Soul Festival

Body & Soul Festival, Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Solstice

Over several months in 2015, Paola used contact microphones to amplify the sound of gestural drawing and Robin Sherry Wood responded with his electronic music. This intensive practice resulted in Elements, a collaborative, largely improvisational performance, which relied on some basic movement and sounds parameters.

Elements was first showcased at The Sonic Laboratory, in the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, in 2015, as part of Sherry Wood’s Masters assessment. The event was received with great interest and the opportunity to collaborate again came up at Foundation16, curated by Brendan Fox in Tullamore in 2016. The work activated the exhibition space and was captured by video.

The body of the performer mediates between mark making and sound technology. Emerging from a minimal choreographic starting point, based on simple movement parameters, an improvised exploration develops. The span of the artists’ body determines the shape and scale of the drawing, while her movements and the contact of the graphite with the paper are made audible through the microphones.

This work examines an engagement with listening as experienced by both artists and the audience, it invites both embodiment and sound making into the realm of the visual. A dialogue based on rhythm and sound unfolds between the collaborating artists as they perform.

F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Culture Night

Culture Night, F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Elements

Drawing

Dance

Performative drawing and collaboration have been central to Paola’s work for years. The artist sees the body as the locus of both personal and cultural narratives. Institutional oppression begins with the control of bodies and with the regulation of drives and impulses. In a time of mass displacement and forced migrations the body can become the only home left to inhabit, and bodies, in revolt, war or natural disasters, perform in the spectacle of TV and online news.

, the artist explored the possibility of building an installation that also functioned as  a stage set in the theatrical  sense. Sound became part of  the drawing  performances, prompting synaesthetic responses. Collaborating with Fiona Quilligan was an initiation into  the choreographic process..  DJ and broadcaster Nigel Wood brought his vast world music collection and his expertise to the project. Thanks to Sami Moukaddem for offering the use of his music to this project.

Two earlier solo exhibitions, Natural Artifice at Soma Contemporary in 2014, and Body Drawings, at Pallas projects in Dublin in 2012, had displayed Catizone’s two hand drawings, performance videos and other drawings and paintings. Choreographer Fiona Quilligan was a guest performer at the openings.

Converge Diverge emerged from these earlier iterations. In The back Loft, Catizone’s earlier drawings were shown and new work was also made in situ, with the addition of sound added to the drawing process.

La Catedral Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Converge Diverge

After exploring performative drawings for years, Catizone moved away from the use of hand- held drawing materials to use the whole body as the means of mark making.  

Based on a dance exploration aimed at sensitising the skin, the movement sequence employed involved bringing the entire surface of the body in touch with the graphite powder placed on  the drawing surface which was in turn secured onto the gallery floor.

This project consisted of a series of seven performances, one every day. One of seven hand made white dresses was used on each performance , and was transformed from pure white to dusty black, until, one by one, at the end of the seven days, all dresses had been darkened.

Each performance was filmed daily and added to the projection in the space, increasing the duration of the video and engaging with time as a working  element.

Performance props and traces were accumulated to build an installation.

An edited version of Smudge was selected and  shown as part of RAW, a  performance art online exhibition organized by the performance collective Bbeyond in January of  2021.

Bbeyond Performance Collective, Online

RAW virtual exhibition

Satellite Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Motley

A4 Gallery, Thomas Street, Dublin, Ireland

NCAD MFA Show

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Smudge

“Drawing is not a window on the world but a device for understanding our place in the universe”

Catizone’s work is the fruit of an ongoing practice that has been developing over several years. She became interested in drawing during her BA, when she started producing large drawings.

Scale added a physical element to her work,  with the artist drawing on her background in movement and dance. The large scale of the drawings  also gave an immersive feel to the process, a sense of being within the drawing, sensing its lines kinesthetically rather than visually controlling them from the outside.

The work gradually became more embodied, and she began to use choreographic parameters to give structure to long sessions of drawing. These became more performative, with the process as much part of the work as the finished pieces. She soon began to interact and collaborate with dancers, choreographers and musicians.

A number of students and dance professionals volunteered to work with Catizone in the Students Gallery in NCAD in March of 2013. The work was documented in film and, together with the drawings made, used for an exhibition in Pallas Projects in May of 2013.

The discordances between live, mediated, natural and unnatural are at the center of this work. The artist  questions the claims of authenticity and truthfulness in art: is live performance more real than video? Does the ‘halo’ of authenticity lend value to a work of art?  How much can we trust what we see? Especially when reality and information are mediated through the lenses, the editing tools and the technological apparatuses of contemporary media.

The ephemerality and directness of performative drawing responds to current values of chronic socio/economic uncertainty and of media filtering of truth. In drawing, direct experience and impermanence are proposed to the viewer, who becomes witness to the live emergence of lines.

This is contrary to tradition where drawing and painting have taken place in isolation, in the privacy of the studio. Through immediate gestures marks are conveyed without effects or technical artifice, in a quest for a truthfulness of mark making and of presence.

Embodied drawing has its roots in the practice of a line of artists like Robert Morris, Morgan O’Hara and Matthew Barney to name a few.

A performance in collaboration with DJ Nigel Wood and Choreographer Fiona Quilligan took place during the month of the exhibition.

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Natural Aritifice

Permanent collection. Garter Lane Museum, Waterford, Ireland

Untitled (two-hand drawing)

Natural Artifice

Ian Nolan and Paola Catizone collaborated to produce a film based on Paola’s two-hand drawing  performative  practice.

Catizone held multiple graphite sticks in each hand to create  complex drawings based on simple choreographic parameters:

Arm span determining the scale of the drawing

Repetition and rhythm underlying the movements

Nolan overlapped three layers of video to create the illusion of three identical female figures moving and drawing together,  reminiscent of the layering methods used in drawing and painting, with an hypnotic effect.

The spider-like triple figure that emerged seemed to be weaving a thick web of lines, patiently building through repetition.  Catizone’s notion of art- making as a meditative practice and of weaving as a metaphor for  repairing and healing are embodied in this work.

Nataraja is the many armed god of dance, one of the emanations of the god Shiva in the Hindy tradition. Catizone’s four decades of work as a yoga and movement facilitator influenced the spirit of the two hand drawings, which were at first performed to the sound of Indian Ragas.

For Collaborations 2014, Nataraja was  projected on a large sheet of Fabriano paper and presented  with  an accompanying  set of choreographic drawing directions and chunks of graphite for public use. The work became interactive, with public participation filmed and edited into the original video,and incorporated into the projection.

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Collaborations

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Nataraja

Catizone displayed a set of large, performative, two-hand drawings which she made over the space of two years. The drawings were made to either live music or to a selection of tracks curated by DJ Nigel Wood.

Wood played at the opening and a recorded selection of tracks used for the making of the drawings were played in the gallery for the week.

Choreographer Fiona Quilligan performed an embodied response to the work on the opening night also.

A short talk and Q&A session took place after the performance.

Paola Catizone

Performance

Be-coming Tree, 2024

Live Art Ireland, Milford House, Co Tipperary, Ireland

L’Etranger, 2023

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival, The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

Bodyscapes, 2023

The Peatlands Project: Castletown House, Earth Rising & Birr Castle

Thunderous Silence, 2023

Sleepertown, Fossanova Abbey and Lago di Giulianello, Lazio, Italy

Qanuk Snowflake, 2022

Earth Rising, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Breaking Cover, 2021

IMMA Outdoors, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Being Water, 2018

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Solstice, 2017

Body & Soul Festival, Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Elements, 2016

Culture Night, F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Converge Diverge, 2015

La Catedral Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Smudge, 2014

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Natural Artifice, 2014

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Nataraja, 2014

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Body Drawings, 2013

Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland