Click here for video documentation.

Click here for Untitled (Syncope) notes.

I don’t think the work is adequately represented by this edit however it is an interesting document and reflects the reality that the work was difficult to view as it moved significantly and without clear logic in and out of the audience. The audience flocked and unflocked as they shifted in their groupings to allow me to move, sometimes in incredibly close proximity.

The residency at The School of Biosciences concluded in December with many indications and promising suggestions that to fund raise and continue would be a fruitful and encouraged.

It’s a tough thing, to leave what feels like work that is just beginning to gather momentum and become something.

I’m currently in the intriguing process of pursuing opportunities for further funding for continued research and development with spider silk and cell cultures.

I have also being pursuing other projects and collaborations including a period of time developing material at Chisenhale Dance Space in London, which I will make a separate writing on shortly.

I also attended and spoke at the sk-interfaces conference, hosted at FACT where the sk-interfaces exhibition was also on - see previous entries for details. I do recommend the accompanying publication which I also was invited to contribute to.

sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders - Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society.
edited by Jens Hauser.
Published by Liverpool University Press and FACT
ISBN: 9781846311499

As a satellite part of the sk-interfaces series of events I’ll present a new version of inthewrongplacesness (one more time with feeling) at Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool. It will also form part of their Happenstance programme of work shown over the weekend of April 4th, 5th and 6th. It includes Yoko Ono, Franko B and Rajni Shah.

The work will be similar in form to other versions but this time the non human animal, a female pig, will be spit roasted the following day.

A new work in very early stages of developement is:

falling asleep with a pig.

A sleeping action/installed performance by a female human animal and a female non-Human animal.

Human animal: Kira O’Reilly
Non-human animal: Female pig, yet to be selected.

This is a proposed new work that emerges out of previous research and art works that explored interspecies metamorphosis and mergences. These were developed whilst working with primary cell cultures of pigskin within a bioscience context and subsequent actions/performances with female pig carcasses. The investigations and the performance inthewrongplaceness, generated a variegated set of engagements with the actualities of working with animal as resource, animal within art practice and the troubled practices of both.

 Originally Commissioned by HOME for One to One Salon series, London, January 2005

The piece emerged out of pig biopsies I have made from piggy bodies in the large animal facility in University of Western Australia as part of my research in tissue culturing skin whilst at SymbioticA.

Each of these pig I have seen killed, taken skin form and then cultivated it in the laboratory. Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Lace out of flesh.
The pigs are standing in my stead, my body, as eventually I will work from a biopsy of my flesh.

One female pig carcass
One female human body
The two move together very slowly over the course of several hours
Audience members enter the space one at a time for 10 minutes.
The are invited to touch the human animal and non-human animal
First they are instructed to put on a pair of latex gloves and then to spray ethanol onto the gloves.
They are also reminded that they can just look and stay a while.

Click here for a Quicktime movie of images:

inthewrongplaceness HOME 2005

This week I visited the biomaterials department at the School of Dentistry in Birmingham where there is considerable research and developement into scaffolds; polymers, hydrogels. I mentioned some previous tissue cutlturing onto silken fibres obtained from Ann Farren, a lecturer, curator and maker at Curtin University of Technology, Perth. The idea was posited to tissue culture onto spiders webs, something I’ve been interested to try since the idea was put to me by Stuart Bunt at SymbioticA.

The spider silk tissue culture idea is an intriging one, from both material scientific and metaphorical points of view. An array of associations and and nascent possibilites emerge when considering combining biological materials; silks, species, cells types, also the issue of cell mobility - would the cells dismantle and alter the integrity of a web they were cultured onto? Would it be possible to encourage a web to be made in situ (in vitro) and then used for tissue culturing purposes. There’s the suggestion of metaphorical and material interplays.

It also brings to mind work by Ken Renaldo’s Spider Haus, “a transpecies communication artwork designed to allow humans to observe the delicate beauty of the common house spider (Theridiidae). . . This work is designed as comfortable home for spiders with a hybrid rapid prototyped plant, which has spikes for easy web attachment.”

Much of Ken’s work posits animalcentric points of view, habitats and sometimes mobile physical environments that can amplify and manifest interspecies interactions through very beautiful combinations and interfaces between organism, robotics and software. He began as a ballet dancer and tells this great bitter sweet story about seeing Baryshnikov dance and figuring he’s never reach those extraordianary hights, but there is an innate beauty and awareness of movement and space embodied within his complex, elegant art works.