Professor and head of the Sculpture Department at Burren College of Art, Aine Phillips is a contemporary artist working with installations and performance art. Burren College of Art was founded in 1993 by Michael Greene and Mary Hawkes-Green in order to offer students to explore their creative potentials in the Burren. The college is surrounded by bare and fissured terraces made out of carboniferous limestone. Phillips currently lives in Derrymore Crusheen County, in Clare, Ireland which is located in the western part of Ireland. She earned her BFA in Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin from 1984-1988. From 1999-2001 Phillps earned a MFA by Research at Limerick School of Art and Design. And more recently, from 2005-2008 she earned a PhD in Fine Art Sculpture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
Phillips is greatly involved in many events around Clare County and the surrounding areas. She founded and is the curator of Tulca Live, which is a festival of live and video art in Galway that started in 2005. Also, Phillips has shown her work in The Museums of Art in Stockholm, Liechtenstein, and Cleveland. She has created work for club and festival events and public places including Morcambe Pier Cumbria, the Moving Image Gallery and the Kitchen New York. She has also shown her work numerous places in Ireland including Galway Arts Center, Granary Cork, Irish Film Center, Arthouse, EV+A Limerick City Gallery, and Hugh Lane Gallery. Phillips is publicly supported by Clare County, the Live Art Development Agency, London, and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Some of Phillips notable performance work are "Sex Birth & Death" 2003, "Harness" 2007, and "Love Lies Bleeding" 2004. Her piece titled "Harness" was performed Friday, April 6, 2007 at the Hotel Ballymun in Dublin. She described her performance by saying, "In this performance, I re-enact experiences of growing up with a profoundly brain damaged brother. This boy who is beautiful and disturbed was harnessed and helmeted in childhood to protect hi face from falling in epileptic seizures...My performance script speaks their modes of harness, translating constraint into tenderness, torture into rapture, helplessness into power." The images that went along with this performance were ones of Phillips harnessed into these white straps and struggling with simple daily tasks. She was able to clearly explain to the audience the daily struggle her brother and now daughter go through because of their condition. Her performance titled "Love Lies Bleeding" from 2004 is a much more seductive and emotional piece that seems very personal internally to the artist herself. "It is about passionate expression, intensity of emotion in the moment and its release...The intensity is presented not as raw emotion but framed and formalised allowing for a cathartic identification in the audience." This performance that took place on February 10, 2005 at the National Review of Live Art UK at the Arches in Glasgow, was four hours in length. The performance involved Phillips tearing her black dress off in shreds, crying vocal lamentations and an "abstract and extemporized referencing traditional Irish Caoineadh." A Caoineadh is described as a formalised weeping song performed by women at funerals and wakes in Ireland. The images that were alongside the performances' descriptions were ones of Phillips mourning and ripping her black dress into shreds and laying all the pieces everywhere. Also, there is a scene where she is interacting with edible flowers that is sexually charged inferring a type of beauty that can come from Caoineadh.
Aine Phillips Artist Website
Burren College of Art Website
NCAD Website
LSAD Website
You should look into Yoko Ono's performance work.
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