Aideen Barry

Aideen Barry: still from a performative film ‘Levitating’.

This work has been informed by the artist’s recent diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder1. Barry’s’ work is sited in investigations into Hysterical behaviour and the uncanny repetitive gesture or Tourette.“ With a play on perspective I aim to create films and performances based on my investigations into optical illusions. My film and animation works reference the subverted female characters in texts from Irish literary figures such as Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu aligned with theories of philosophers who are preoccupied with the notion of unnatural human behaviour, playing with the blur between what is imagined and what is perceived to be, searching for the contemporary Gothic.”
Barry’s investigation into Hysteria, are formed on her observations of the contemporary Gothic, sited in Celtic Tiger Suburbia of modern Ireland. In the essay Unhomely Homes Curator and writer Cliodhna Shaffrey writes Barry presents misalignment, a sense of lurking unease behind images of staid homeliness, of Stepford-zombiness… Levitation possesses the qualities of estrangement, Barry’s double moving as if a ghost, as invisible other, through the rooms of her home, making transparent, uncovering, opening, exposing, cleaning, dusting, vacuuming while at the same time touching into a dark obscurity - the endless repetition at the heart of this work. – Repetition like repression as Sarah Kofman would conclude “is originary and serves to fill an originary lack as well as to veil it.”[vii] And Barry’s double is perhaps, not entirely ignorant of her good-girl house keeping obsessions warding off the evil phantoms that sicken cleanliness and logic and who love the worm-eaten smell of old dust.

[vii] Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art, An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1988), p128 as referenced in Anthony Vidler op cit pp 222.