Interview with Kira O’Reilly

Kira O'Reilly's Menopause Gym will be performed at Mad House on 14–15 September 2024.

Kira O'Reilly photographed in her natural / unnatural habitat by her great friend and colleague, artist Karen Donnellan.

Mad House: Menopause has remained a surprisingly silent topic, even in the arts. You've been in a deep process on the topic for years. How have you structured your work around the personal and the public when it comes to your own body and the age of your body as material for your work?

Kira O’Reilly: When I entered the turbulent, stormy phase known as peri-menopause with its estrogen storms, tides and diminishments, I was entirely without any shred of concern except that of curiosity to what the profundity of this phase of life might be. What might be learned and realised during this transitory phase?

From my perspective menopause has become a hot (pardon the pun), marketable topic in mainstream cultures in Europe and North America. It has been featured in musicals, television programmes, radio discussions, it is widely referred to in the fitness industry, and to some degree in politics. Despite all of this, menopause is frequently corralled into the tedium of endlessly unimaginative jokes about hot flushes, or highly medicalised – in other words treated as a disease or illness with a range of treatable ‘symptoms’. In co-opting menopause into the category of illness, little if any acknowledgement is given it’s passage over time as one of change that yields experiences and awarenesses that are of tremendous value to the individual as well as to those around them, and the wider society and culture.

In some arenas menopause, anti-aging practices that seem to defy or to counter the transitional capacities and potentials, in efforts to retrieve, revive and stabilise a narrow notion and appearance of reproductive womanhood.

Once again, woman becomes synonymous with symptom, perhaps the old archetype much loved by psycho-analysis and feminist psycho-analytic theory of the hysteric is irresistibly re-activated, a figuration of femininity, one which is not entirely comprehensible, cohesive, or conforming. In my early works I referenced the hysteric as the unruly, uncontainable proto-feminist trope.

Over the years I’ve taken much inspiration from artists such as Lois Weaver, who has endlessly spoken and made artworks about ageing. Lois Weaver’s work in theatre is activist, queer, feminist, and socially engaging. Ageing is a sculptural project we see with the example of Eleanor Antin’s beautiful versions of Carving: A Traditional Sculpture 1972 and CARVING: 45 Years Later, 2017. Antin’s latter iteration is also an expression of the enormous grief she experienced at the death of her life partner and collaborator of 55 years, David Antin. I am thrilled that this autumn Mad House will present Oblivia’s very own Annika Tudeer as she marks her 60th birthday with Turn Turtle Turn with contemplations on life and death.

I’ve long worked with performance art strategies that navigate the private and public – I think this is one of the crucial aspects of performance art – and what makes it different from theatre. As a visual artist, working with my own physicality, the materiality of my bodiliness is a sculptural practice. Bodies move, change, are malleable and mutable. Just as the body mimicking materials of classic sculpture suggest via techniques of casting, carving, modelling. The sashay between being of body and its matter, and the mattering of body is a dynamic relationship of positive and negative space.

This is beautifully exposed in Matthew Barney’s film work Secondary, 2023 which I saw in London recently. Driven by his ongoing preoccupations with athletics, and male bodies engaged in catastrophic violence, the 5 channel film made in his warehouse studio, stages material encounters, be it sculpture materials and/or choreographed human bodies. Visual artist and dance maker Florence Peake takes a different tack with clay and now plaster, encasing, firing, pouring and drying negative space. We know and recognise these formal treatments of sculptural making, our bodies know, we are knowing bodies. The phenomena of our public and private material beingness is bodily and is our flesh and how it is a continual processual, metabolising motion of being in and of space.

How the public and private are parsed is distinctly cultural and  particular to where, how, why, and who. Therefore context becomes another intimate part of the work. We know this, but perhaps this dimension is too often permitted to become unconscious, invisible and unarticulated.

MH: You work on a living installation and sculpture that creates a gym and "Performing on the edge of can and can't". You also wrote earlier about your resistant training practice. What does this mean in your artistic practice?

KO’R: The current dominant concept – is that for health and wellbeing as a menopausal woman, muscle atrophy and osteoporosis is best thwarted by training with weights – in other words by applying resistance. What is perhaps not acknowledged, or even considered is the exquisite corpse of change, the dysregulations and alterities inherent in the unpredictability of matter and of mattering.

My approach for this work, much of its investigations invite balance, out of balance, loss of balance, precariousness and absurdities into its play.

Training is not separate from my artistic practice.
The gym is a studio; the studio is a gym. Not that I have a studio - unfortunately – so the gym partially functions as one.
The gym relates to the pliability of one’s physicality, the suppleness of being matter subjected to methods, techniques. My training in gyms is a studio practice, it does not sit outside or elsewhere. The gym is a place to think, to find extraordinary connections – participating in an exquisite corpse – the surrealist game of drawing a bit of a body – not knowing the other parts being drawn, before marvelling at the reveal of the beautiful shock of a monstrosity.

I’ve worked with physical disciplines, with the idea of physical practice throughout my artistic education and artistic career. To have a practice involves a continual returning to – a repetition of the application of a method, where – paradoxically one encounters continual difference and change. Things do not remain the same. Practice contains within it the supple scrupulousness of variation.

In her essay ‘Against Ordinary Language: Language of the Body’ Kathy Acker writes: 

I want to shock my body into growth; I do not want to hurt it.

. . . I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions; I count seconds between repetitions; I count time, seconds or minutes, between sets: From the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity I just continually count.

Acker points to an antagonism between verbal language and bodybuilding, between the demands of resistance, breath and count and verbal articulation.

This essay has remained important to me over the many years since I first read it because, a) Kathy Acker was such a renegade in her deployment of an adroit literariness and b) loss of verbal language means that the visual – visuality and the other senses we employ in our art making practice are not subservient to that of concept – linguistic concept. Acker observes, In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of its becoming lost.

To read an earlier writing by me on menopause, see https://www.kiraoreilly.com/blog/2024/9/4/menopause-performance-reading-text-from-2020

MH: You divide your time and practice between Finland and many other countries, and you have a wide experience of different working environments in art. What does the landscape of contemporary performance art in Finland look like for you in these times of, among other threats, huge financial cuts for arts and a cruel political climate?

KO’R: I am primarily based in Finland, being Irish I spend a bit of time there, and when I can, in Nepal which is a place of religious pilgrimage for me as well as holding great artistic and cultural significance. I return to the UK where I lived before Finland for a short visit about once a year, often engaging in conversation with artist friends, writers, event organisers and seeing work.

I see very little performance art in Finland, often what is referred to as performance art is what I understand as experimental theatre or dance. The lineages of practice I work with and the primary histories and methods emerge from performance art as being part of the larger and wider practices of visual art. I’m really old school about it. Boringly so. Which is not to say that there isn’t great value in other kinds of contemporary performance practice – and where these merge, infiltrate, hybridise and gloop into new and other promiscuous forms.

Artists have seemingly only too often endured cuts, precarity and jeopardy. Part of the stultifying conditions some artists work with is this as an ongoing reality to a greater or a lesser extent. Being in my late ‘50s I currently find there is virtually no demand for my work and a massive absence of critical and curatorial engagement. It’s sobering to say the least. I have to consider how I am going to survive as I pass out of middle age into whatever the phase before old age is. It’s tricky and daunting. I look towards the same old people, the elders who’ve always modelled radical practice and who do so with guts and vision. But, I also realise I can rely on my sea legs, the resilience of turbulence that ageing offers. Upon entering menopause all the images and metaphors that came to me were marine ones - particularly of pirates; of unmapped and uncharted seas, of the resilience of seafaring legs - strong and able to move with turbulence.
Coming from the south west of Ireland, the Atlantic coast, the concept of sea is of motile volatility and power. 

There is always an irresistible pull to make work of some kind or other because that is what one does. As an artist. Create. Hence there is an absolute and inviolable impulse and necessity to create and make entirely irrespective of professional ebbs and flows and independant from external demands or requests.

That’s the good news.

Of course, we all wish, want and hope to live in a climate of generous or at least adequate arts funding that recognises the contribution the arts make to economics as well as culture and society. We all care about how this informs and affects what can be done, how and where. Cuts can dramatically impact one's professional possibilities as an artist - and this is dreadful, cuts cannot diminish one's being an artist and one's ability to function as one. 

Much of the performance art that shaped and continues to inform me was always intrinsically informed, to a greater or lesser extent by various combinations of marginality, resistance of various kinds and genuine risk and experimentation. Here in Finland I encourage artists, all of us,  to be less careful, less well behaved, to rely on our collective selves more, to craft communities through friendship and – to really cultivate intergenerational communities. Perhaps we would do well to be less siloed in our disciplinary scenes, to be less regimented professionally in terms of who gets to show what where. Might it be that we suffer greatly from policing the artistic disciplines too thoroughly. Open the borders entirely to promote full artistic activity across forms and media.