ELLA DE BÚRCA OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE TO DATE.
My mixed-media practice functions through modes of inquiry, working through performance, sculpture, and poetry to focus on how humans construct meaning, particularly from a female perspective. I have created site-specific installations and scripts that develop from historical events, merging, layering, and adding my own musings and fictions. My creations become hybrid entities that look towards a future of inclusivity, while envisioning an Irish society in which artists are taken seriously.
My work has been shown in many settings, from small-scale artist-run spaces (Artbox, Dublin, 2015) and large institutions (Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, 2017) to museums (Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin, 2024), bars (Smoking Concert at L’Archiduc, Brussels, 2018), and biennials (Emergency Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2013). In Ireland, my work has been supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Fingal County Council, and Culture Ireland. Most recently, I was the recipient of a Platform 31 bursary, awarded by Laois County Council.
Ella de Búrca, Pirouette, 2019, performance at the Hugh Lane Gallery; image courtesy of the artist.
In 2016, I was accepted for a two-year residency at the renowned HISK institute in Ghent, Belgium, which provided me with a personal studio, access to highly skilled technicians, and monthly studio visits with European-based curators and art practitioners. Having such professionalism focused on my practice changed my outlook and my output. I went on to study for a PhD at KU Leuven, Belgium, obtaining my doctorate in 2022.
In 2018 I had a solo exhibition at The Room Gallery at The University of California, Irvine, USA. Flat As The Tongue Lies (2018) used a three-act structure to explore the formation of meaning through reading, writing, and speech. In reference to eighteenth-century closet dramas – plays written mostly by women and intended for private reading rather than public performance – my three-act play existed as a place for a disembodied voice. My performative installation enabled reflection on forms of censorship in a moment when male-dominated discourse continued to frame women’s narratives in relation to their own bodies.
In 2019, I published a book in collaboration with Jim Ricks and Michaële Cutaya, stemming from a residency in San Francisco. IRLDADA: 201916 (Black Crown Press, 2019) was launched at The Hugh Lane Gallery, and I created a site-specific performance as part of the launch. In Pirouette (2019), the main gesture of the performance doesn’t take place. A female ballerina is requested to do a single pirouette in front of the gathered audience, who circle her while I give a long contextual introduction to the history of viewing, spanning from Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (Maunsel & Co., 1907) to Futurism.
Important to the work is the history of claquers. There were claquers both for and against Pirouette. Some actors, planted among the gathered audience, interrupted my long introduction with impatience, some coughing, growing more and more frustrated with my overarching phrases and grandiose statements. Finally, one cheeky plant asked: “What has this got to do with the pirouette?” Another plant retorted, and I continued on, but not for long before there was another interruption.
The Playboy of the Western World provoked audience disruption and riots during its first performance at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. Hugh Lane, after whom the gallery is named, and whose aunt was Lady Gregory (co-founder of the Abbey Theatre), was one of a group of men drafted in as claquers to cheer that 1907 performance in the face of audience disruption. The conversation circled on but alas, the pirouette never happened.
I am currently showing a performance in the group exhibition, ‘Is This a Poem’, curated by Christodoulos Makris, which continues at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) until July. Exposing the Doubt was developed in 2019 and centres around the act of dying on stage. In a nod to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Evergreen Review, 1958), the performance is structured as a conversation with myself, filled with bickering and self-depreciation. This self-conversation was facilitated by pre-recording one half of the conversation, in which scripted technical glitches set up the performative onstage death.
Ella de Búrca, Exposing the Doubt, 2019-24; image courtesy of the artist.
It is in this moment, when the tape stops and I ask the audience if I can start again, that I find most fascinating to perform. The people in the audience always look truly horrified to see me dying on stage, and it’s their embarrassment that invigorates this performance of female anxiety and nerves.
Going forward, I am collaborating with Glandwr on research that involves reflecting on and activating Irish female health, in particular endometriosis and maternity practices. Glandwr holds this space, as I gather a group of artists, researchers, and creators whose bodies have been medicated, spelled, and potioned, both in and out of the health system. Together we will share images, songs, and stories at roundtable discussions, the output of which will form the basis of a performative installation for a group exhibition in late 2024, supported by Fingal County Council.
Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and lecturer at SETU Wexford College of Art.
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