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Helena Walsh


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Lena Šimic´ writing on Helena Walsh’s performance MOM- Marks of Motherlands in the book Maternal Performance Feminist Relations by Lena Šimic´ and Emily Underwood-Lee (2021).

‘I want to return to the moment when I first saw M.O.M. Marks of Motherlands (2007) by Helena Walsh at the ‘Intimacy Across Digital and Visceral Performance’ conference at Goldsmiths University, London. This was one of those moments when I was truly unsettled by the experience of viewing performance art, in this case by its maternal theme and its brutality on the body: the performer enacting brutality on her own maternal body [..] We entered the darkness of the studio and we sat on the floor, I seem to remember. Walsh was stark naked as she entered the stage, which was full of plastic baby bottles and brittle brushes placed in an orderly manner. A video projection came on in the background, images of milking cows, of rural Ireland. I can’t seem to remember if there were any images of the Troubles, but it was clear that this was a piece about war, devastation, failures of the body, of the motherland. Walsh was marching around the stage as a soldier, later on bandaging her breasts, filling her mouth with some gauze, sucking her fingers in the process of doing it, gagging even. At one point she placed one of the baby bottles next to her sex, inviting it to act as a dildo, an inadequate phallus. In the final act of the piece, she started cleaning herself with a brittle brush, pushing it into her vagina. She squatted on the floor, her legs wide open, and stuck the brush into herself, penetrating herself, cleaning herself. The brush was pulled out stained with blood. All throughout the piece I was unnerved. The final action unsettled me further. What is this? Motherhood? How can it be this bad, this violent? Is this what motherhood produces? Is this what this artist feels about becoming a mother? There were references in the piece about mastitis and her failure to breastfeed, interspersed with images of milking cows. All was so raw, so mechanical and brutal. Following the piece I could hardly speak. I quickly told my partner we better go, I wasn’t going to speak to this artist, this was one of the most devastating and shocking pieces I had ever seen. It was much later on that I was more able to process the performance, try to understand why such violence was necessary upon the body by the artist herself, in public moreover. After all, it is only in public where artwork has a capacity to become a part of discourse, of knowledge, of exposure of maternal realities and brutalities. Eventually, I became friends with Walsh and we have collaborated on a number of projects, supporting each other’s work. M.O.M. Marks of Motherlands toured to Art Workshop Lazareti in Dubrovnik, my hometown. This was an artistic exchange that I helped organize and for which I am glad. Unfortunately, I did not see the piece in my hometown on tour, but in some ways I have contributed to spreading a particular version of real maternal experience into the public sphere, exposing the ideal myth of motherhood internationally too. The shock of the maternal is such that the new mother is catapulted into the land of overwhelming love, pleasure and pain, jouissance, ambivalence, depression. M.O.M. Marks of Motherlands did something to me, viscerally, through my body. It was a kind of shock, a break, an interruption which needed to happen in order for me to process the performance, and eventually decide to research its field in depth. The first task was to map a number of maternal performances which were lived maternal experiences made public. For that shock I am deeply grateful to Helena Walsh, her courage as well as the brutality of her maternal aesthetics.’

See: Maternal Performance Feminist Relations by Lena Šimic´ and Emily Underwood-Lee (2021). Palgrave Macmillan, p.3-4.

Re-enactment of Buttered Up (2020)
-Helena Walsh, Re-enactment of Buttered Up, as part of Aine Phillip's exhibition at MART, Dublin 2020
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‘At the back of the space, a two-seater orange corduroy couch is being slathered in butter by a lady-like figure in a red dress and kitten heel boots. This is performance artist Helena Walsh’s live enactment of Phillips’ Buttered up in the Couch. She inhabits the role through her physicality, bringing to bear her own practice of interrogating embodied femininities. Back straight, heels together she leans forward. As she covers the folds and gaps of the cushions in butter, they become discomfortingly vulvic. […] This taps into visceral experience and the discomfort and abject pleasure of mess making. The act not only transgresses the permissible, but also upends the regime of order that women are tasked with imposing on domestic spaces. Donning a swim hat and goggles Walsh aims herself towards the couch hands poised. As she wedges herself into the ‘centerfold’, the ladylike postures of her legs are at odds with the subversive impropriety of the act. Whilst signifying being swallowed up by the domestic space, the performance also enacts a form of revenge, disrupting the quiet domination of homeliness.’
- Katherine Nolan (2020), Buttered Up, VAN: Visual Artist’s News Sheet, Issue 3 May-June 2020 https://visualartistsireland.com/buttered-up
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Speaking of IMELDA (2013-2018)
-Speaking of IMELDA, Knickers for Choice Campaign Video ‘No Longer the Quiet Woman’ (Photo: Kevin Biderman)
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‘Walsh is one of the founding members of Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion (IMELDA), a group of women and artists lobbying for the right to abortion and including women active in the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (1980-2000). Like American avant-garde artists, Walsh aims at fusing art and life, and she regularly intervenes in spaces other than art galleries to heighten the visibility of her live art practice and commitments.’
- Valérie Morisson (2020) ‘Countering Allegorical Motherhood in Irish and Northern Irish Contemporary Art: The Female Body as a Tool for Resistance’ in Motherhood in Contemporary International Perspective: Continuity and Change ed. by Professor Fabienne Portier Le-Cocq. Routledge
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‘In the article […] ‘Performances of autonomy: Feminist performance practice and reproductive rights activism in Ireland’, Helena Walsh examines her own work as a member of the London-based performance group IMELDA (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion) as well as other contemporary Irish feminist performance practices. This highlights the key role that performance has played in securing women’s rights, especially in the lead up to the May 2018 referendum that legalized abortion in the Republic of Ireland.’ ’
- Marie Kelly, Siobhán O’Gorman and Áine Philips, (2020) Editorial for Scene: Special Issue on Performance and Ireland, 8 (1 &2), pp. 3-6
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Autonomy (2016)
-Helena Walsh, Autonomy, 2016, in Future Histories, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin (Photo: Joseph Carr)
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‘‘Throughout the 12 hours of the event, Helena Walsh maintained watch in the centre of the East Wing, the famous Victorian era Panopticon. Decorating the central stairwell like a spring trestle, Easter lilies and apples became her weapons of choice. Walsh spends the day glaring at the audience, many of whom awkwardly attempt to deflect her stare. Her disruption of the gaze, occupying both the position of the watcher and being watched in the center of the Panopticon, offered a strong presence in the space, with her heels clicking up and down the stairs in a repetitious rhythm that dominated the room. Every once in a while her hands came together, tips and fingers touching to create a gaping hole in reference to the Sheela-na-gig fertility sculptures that once adorned buildings in Ireland. Drawing inspiration from the women involved in the 1916 Rising, Walsh created a scene of resilience, of female subjectivity deferred through the creation of the Irish nation.’’
- El Putnam, (2016) ‘Discipline, Resistance, Resilience,’ Visual Artists of Ireland News Sheet, July-August 2016 https://issuu.com/visualartistsireland/docs/2016_04_jul_aug_van/23
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‘‘Kilkenny artist Helena Walsh resposed on the landing wing of the jail underneath an arch of flowers. Her performance was inspired by the women of the Rising.’’
- Ronan McGreevy, (2016) ‘Kilmainham Gaol opens its doors to performance artists’ in The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/kilmainham-gaol-opens-its-doors-to-performance-artists-1.2656470
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For film footage of this performance and more about Future Histories please visit the Arts Council of Ireland
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The Wrens (2013)
-Helena Walsh, The Wrens, (2013) 'I'm with you: Daytime Drama', Rivington Place (photo by Christa Holka)
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‘In The Wrens, Helena Walsh pays a tribute to the Irish prostitutes known as ‘the wrens’ who gathered nearby the military camp of The Curragh, Co. Kildare and its vicinity during the 1860s and 1870s. These women, whose life is relatively well- documented (Luddy, 2007, 61-76), were described as “wretched and desperate outcasts” looking like wild animals and stripped of all femininity (Luddy, 2007, 68). In her performance, Walsh embodies one of them. By borrowing from past representations and popular images of femininity, Walsh makes clear that she questions representations. Like other feminist performers (Cindy Sherman for instance), Walsh is aware that “the battlefield of identity is inextricably wrapped up in the histories of the way identities have been marked, imaged, reproduced in the realm of cultural imagery” (Schneider, 1997, 10). Walsh is interested not in women as an essential category but in the way some women were victims of widespread representations and reduced to objects of moral discourse. Now, performance turns the symbolic into the literal, the object into a subject, the category into individuality. […] In The Wrens, the stereotypical representations of purity and glamour are negated as the artist paints one of her leg in camouflage green before soiling her dress and skin with the paint (ill. 2). This gesture is reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann’s use of paint, grease and chalk on her naked body in Eye Body (1963), a performance transferring the abstract expressionists’ techniques onto the female body. In The Wrens, the green paint explicitly keys prostitution to the presence of the military. As a matter of fact, up to 500 prostitutes lived in the wrens and its vicinity; in 1879, 2,900 prostitutes were prosecuted for trespassing on the Curragh Camp (Luddy, 2007, 68). The camouflaged female body symbolizes the tacit acceptance of prostitution by the military and the government (Luddy, 2007, 61-63). However, by painting her own legs in green, Walsh also restores agency and self-will.’
- Morisson, Valérie, (2016) ‘Contemporary performance art by Helena Walsh: embodiment as empowerment in an Irish context,’ Revue Miroirs, 4 ,Vol.1, pp.132-153. http://www.revuemiroirs.fr/links/femmes/volume1/article8.pdf
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In Pursuit of Pleasure at LABOUR (2012)
-Helena Walsh, Autonomy, 2016, in Future Histories, Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin (Photo: Joseph Carr)
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‘Helena Walsh - goddess-like – enacted gestures of filling condoms with laundry washing powder, attempting their insertion into her vagina, subsequently piercing them with knitting needles to create a mound of fragrant powder on a bed of soil.’
- Áine Phillips (2019) ‘Critical Perspectives: An incomplete history of performance art in Ireland (and its blood relationship to theatre)’ in Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950 ed by Patrick Lonergan: Methuen Drama
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'Irish live artist Helena Walsh also challenged the containment and policing of menstrual blood in her performance In Pursuit of Pleasure (2012) during which she wore a ‘bullet belt’ of baby bottles filled with menstrual blood and milk around her waist. Symbolically defiling a pile of soil and laundry detergent with this mixture of blood and milk, Walsh transgressed heteronormative borders surrounding notions of purity. […] These artistic interventions begin the work of unravelling the menstrual taboo through the violation of preconceived rules and borders that construct gender and impinge upon identity.'
- Eleanor Careless, Alex Coupe and Edwin Coomasaru ‘Seeing Red: Menstrual Blood and Abortion Politics’ (6 March 2017) https://fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/seeing-red-menstrual-protest-and-abortion-politics/
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‘LABOUR is of great historical significance. Issues of labour and gender are particularly critical within an Irish context, and at the same time Irish women artists or women artists based in Ireland are creating some of the most exciting and challenging performance based work of our times.’
- Lois Keidan, The Live Art Development Agency (2012) in LABOUR Exhibition Catalogue. Dublin: The Lab / Dublin City Council

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‘Helena Walsh used her body to present a defiant female sexuality that challenged any form of moral regulation of the female body. She demanded an engagement with her audience, holding her gaze on individuals as they entered the mezzanine space upstairs. As I entered, the artist observed me from a mound of sand in the middle of the gallery where she was perched, her legs sprawled apart. As I held her gaze for a few seconds, she proceeded to put what appeared to be a holy communion Eucharist into her mouth, chewed it for a few seconds, and then spat it back at me. Her performance was unnerving, and she deliberately used her body and female sexuality to subvert and challenge any form of containment or regulation.’
- Liz Burns, ‘Labour Intensive,’ in Visual Artists of Ireland News Sheet, May-June 2012 https://issuu.com/visualartistsireland/docs/vanmayjune2012

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The exhibition catalogue can be accessed here and a film on the LABOUR exhibition can be accessed here. LABOUR was curated by Chrissie Cadman, Amanda Coogan and Helena Walsh

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Invisible Stains (2010)
-Helena Walsh, Invisible Stains (2010) at Right Here, Right Now, Kilmainham Gaol Dublin (Photo: Joseph Carr).
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‘The over flow of stimuli, creeping cold and the passing of time leave their mark and derange my perceptual capacity. It’s been two hours or more... three, perhaps four boxes of washing powder away? I see three baby grows hanging inertly from the railings, their legs heavily-laden with soggy washing powder - a mimesis of masculinity. There is something sinister in this representation, a subtle resonance of the subdued female voices? The sweet, soapy scent of powder disperses slowly around the room as the woman drowns yet another playsuit in the blue washtub. Engrossed in the mundane everyday reality, she resembles Vermeer’s heroines, beautiful and stoic. The cold water spills over and splatters around soaking her dress and bare feet. I can feel the cold and dampness. How does she overcome the limits of her own body? She finally stops, wrenches the dripping material and freezes in a statue-like, empowering, almost suggestive pose of female domination. There is a quiet determination in her gesture, verging on the feminist and political. When she begins to repeat the cycle of events for the fifth time, I now notice that each of the baby outfits has a number and the word unknown inscribed on it. Suddenly, the recent news reports, countless articles and radio accounts related to the discovery of one hundred and thirty three unnamed graves at High Park Convent in 1993 run through my head. I am no longer a mere spectator but a witness to the darkest and persistently haunting part of the Irish history - the Magdalene Laundries. And this woman in front of me challenges the predominant representation of femininity. She is no longer the subordinate of the patriarchal status quo, but a progenitor in establishing the female presence, speaking on behalf of those whose voices are not included in the gender and equality discourse.'
- Magdalena Maria Wieckiewicz, Helena Walsh at Right Here, Right Now, Kilmamham Gaol (2012). http://performanceartlive.weebly.com/helena-walsh-magdalena-maria-wieckiewicz-joseph-carr.html
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‘Walsh was dressed in an improvised carb of cloth and close pegs, a certain kind of modesty pervaded the performance. She held, what looked like a new born infant, fabricated from a ‘onesie‘ filled with washing powder; a ritual which was re-enacted over and over again throughout the four hour duration of the performance. […] In a sense she was caught in a ritual loop, every now and again stopping before a baby-blue basin of water to dunk the cloth-baby signifier; which on closer inspection was numbered. The strong smell of Walsh’s washing powder pervaded the immediate area where her performance took place: visual symbolism was overpowered by an olfactory stink.’
- James Merrigan, ‘A Post- Patriotic Performance: Helena Walsh, Sinead McCann, Alex Conway, Right Here, Right Now, Kilmainham Gaol, November 4,’ Billion Journal, (2010). http://billionjournal.com/time/3.html