Rebecca Dunne is an artist whose work treads the borders, pushes the boundaries and falls between the intersections of performance art, theatre, poetry, and visual art.
Her work is draws on themes of home and heritage; space, place, and (not) belonging; storytelling, re-telling, fiction, and non-fiction; connections between people and a live moment; the land, the landscape, history, and ownership.
Through live performance, collective reading, texts, sounds and walking, her practice is engaged with our constant negotiation of the world and the messy, unresolved need to experience it in the present tense, in the live moment, while acknowledging the contexts we come from and sit in.
GRADUATION PROJECT
on line; afterword
A series of walking performances (live, online/over the phone) with the artist, with a text to read and consider together.
A celebration, a reflection, or a memorial?
After a number of walking phone-call performances in lieu of live walking performances, we consider distance, connection, real-life presence, and what might not be a solution, but a viable response or condition to right now.
THESIS
The Slow Burn/Critical Mass
This thesis looks at the economy and value of words, art, and culture; of stories, memories, storytelling, and shared or collective experience both within a personal history and archive and national or international histories and archives; of letting go, moving on, or of preservation; of resistance.
It also touches on the ideas of ownership and borders in relation to the land, to culture and art, and between people.
Within a collective narrative and shared experience of a piece of land and what happens on it; of a memory, a story; of art and culture, there is a value in what is told and who tells it. Through fictionalised narrative, factual accounts, and an attempt to represent the polyvocality of this narrative, the thesis presents the story of a dying industry in the Irish Midlands, the grappling with preservation of both personal and national history and identity, and the role art might play in all of this.