Pea Arts About

TW: sexual violence, rape The Minotaur (Damien Hirst, 2012, image from art.net) This depiction of the half-man, half-bull of Greek myth raping an Athenian virgin presents the violent threat of unfettered male sexuality. Greek and Roman myths abound with brutal stories of the sexual assault of women by men and gods alike. Classical art often aestheticized such scenes, sanitising any explicit reference to intercourse. In myth, such assaults were partly rationalised by claiming that the god Eros was capable of overpowering male bodies and wills at any moment. This pre-Freudian distinction between the conscious and unconscious suggests the Minotaur – which has remained a symbol of sexual violence and male lust, most prominently in the work of Picasso – might here be read as a horrific embodiment of the sleep of reason.  ( Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable guide p. 33) The sleep of reason. From whose perspective? In my experience rapists take what they feel they deserve. What’

You know the hit is coming and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Your body braces automatically even though logic dictates it won’t make any difference. The torrent is coming at you hard and fast. You are vulnerable. Helpless. Perhaps your slight cower is an attempt at self-comfort and assurance. You did all you could. Broader events were beyond your control. It’s not your fault. You’re collateral damage, and it means nothing about you. It is natural to curl into yourself because who else can you rely on? A saviour, a hero, surely couldn’t make it in time.   Andromeda and the Sea Monster , Damien Hirst, 2011, image June 2017 Andromeda and the Sea Monster is a monumental sculpture in blue bronze depicting a young naked woman chained to a rock face, her head angled off to her right and her mouth open in a horrific silent scream, mirroring the wide, toothy mouths of hungry sea creatures frozen in time and space as they surge at her. You could only see the woman’s scream if you

After some enriching conversations during catch-ups at events celebrating Hugh O'Donnell's life, I've been thinking in depth about art writing practices and the ways we engage with art for ourselves and how we communicate it to others. Explaining my Arts Council England-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project to Brian Patterson and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach of Bbeyond was hugely helpful in nudging me back on some sort of track with things somewhat derailed between mothers flinging themselves about with bone-shattering consequences and friends taken from us far too soon. With everyone's memories of Hugh flowing, my own encounters with him came to the fore, and so I'd like to add to my previous post another instance of where cause, effect and encounter led to my own early experiments with blurring the boundary between written documentation and live performance.  I may well be misremembering and misattributing as it was nine years ago, but let's run with

On Saturday 26 November many of us woke to the deeply sad news of the death the previous day of artist and friend-to-all Hugh O'Donnell. Hugh was a member of the Belfast-based performance art collective Bbeyond, a studio-holder at Flax, and an active campaigner for disabled and LGBTQ+ artists and access to the arts. Most importantly, when you had a conversation with Hugh you came away feeling fantastic, elated, as if you and what you were doing mattered. His loss hits hard. I hadn't seen Hugh for ages, mostly because I hadn't been to Belfast for nearly three years and I didn't bump into him when I finally did visit again this summer. My encounters with Hugh, and often together with his partner Aaron, usually occurred when we were having a skinful at Late Night Art or after a Bbeyond performance monthly. In the interim we'd occasionally 'react' to each other's Facebook posts and that's how I knew he was okay and there.  I didn't see enough of Hugh