BOCK WORKS

From September 4th - October 12th I'll be walking the land around West Cork alone and with others exploring the Irish landscape as a place of departure and arrival. I'll be gathering stories of human and plant migration as way to communicate our complex relationship with nature and the land we find ourselves living on

detail from The Parting Cheer by Henry Nelson O'Neil 1861

Butterflies #stilllifeexhibition open September 22 - November 16 at #stjosephshospice #motherandson #collaboration #palimpsest #newwork

Alison preparing the vaccum bag for a leaving portrait. String providing a fitting metaphor for the tangles and connections of people you take with you and leave behind

Alison adding to tabletop scribe i drew visualing her stories of leaving

Met a woman in town. She told me she was planning on leaving town to live in Spain. She's leaving like he parents did once and her grandparents before them. She's in a long line of Irish who left the island of ireland but came back in better times only to leave again. Voyagers? Emigrants? Leavers? Returners? What could they be called? She spoke of her reasons for leaving. Breakdown of community life being one. Facebook seemed to be an example of this, noone comes together like they used to she says

Thinking about memory and the 'body as archive' - when we leave the unfamiliar, our memory can both help to locate ourselves but it can also destablise us. What might your internal survival kit look like?

Day 4

Day 3

Day 2 experiments

Day 2 Scribing up ideas - Potato as living art material? Could it be metaphor for migration? Its a material synonymous with primary school art projects and yet its such a versatile material/vegetable. A cliched of ireland's agricultural heritage but also a vital part of its political, social and global history. Its versatility/adaptability is interesting to me in relation to exploring migration. Can i work through the obvious connections and find a deeper narrative here? Questions questions today.

Day 1  of my two week mini residency at Uillinn (West Cork Arts Centre) 150 years ago half the population of Ireland emmigrated abroad. Now over 80 million people around the world identify as Irish. What does leaving do to us? How does it change us? Each day I will create and potentially perform an act of leaving using the potato as starting point to explore the adaptable, egalitarian, controversial and enduring spirit of the migrant

Plant-pot Camera #camleystreetnaturalpark #unlockingconversations #pinholecamera

Pick a word any word @steph_vr #rapidresponseunit

Drawing in the dark #jangarbarek #royalfestivalhall #drawing #livemusic