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14 Trade School, production still I Know Why Women Cry at Weddings, 2019, performance and sound installation The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, video Pro ile Eimear Walshe Gwen Burlington on the Longford-based Irish artist, writer and educator’s interrogation of sexual politics, queer rights, normative structures of power and historical revisionism. Wearing a white dress shirt with hair slicked back and standing in front of a leafy hedgerow in their parent’s rural back garden, Irish artist Eimear Walshe outlines the three necessary conditions for having sex exclusively outdoors: decriminalisation, good faith and viable logistics. This scene marks the opening to the single-channel video work The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, commissioned for the somewhat ill-fated irst phase of the 39th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art, held in Limerick and forced to shut its physical venues because of another Covid-19 lockdown (although Walshe’s video was planned to be also distributed online). Walshe takes a characteristically punkish and lippant role, overturning the sense of the work being a resource of information. But there is also more to their practice than weighing up sexual logistics. Working across sculpture, writing, performance, installation and research, their work is underpinned by queer and feminist trajectories of thought, incorporating beguiling contradictions that are playful and o en deadpan; exploring Ireland’s historically complex relationship with sexuality, marriage and land – three things that Walshe demonstrates as being inextricably linked. Standing in various rural spaces, such as beside a cattle ield, the side of a road or in an empty ield, Walshe takes us deep into Ireland’s history of the Land Wars (brie ly, agitation on behalf of tenant farmers by the Land League leading to the initiation of the Land Commission in 1881 and subsequent redistribution of land through various Land Acts published into the 20th century). Walshe uses humorous visual examples of key igures, such as paper cut-outs of Lord Leitrim, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, as well as the famous racehorse, Shergar, who plays Walshe’s ‘boyfriend’. Walshe highlights the Land League’s objectives of the three ‘F’s – fair rent, ixity of tenure and freedom of sale – during an unprecedented moment of radical reform which has still not been realised in contemporary Ireland. Walshe cradles a cardboard cut-out of Ireland and, while their voice-over explains these moments in history, they perform exaggerated faces ranging from disinterest to indignance. Walshe makes the case that the colonisation of land and housing has a direct effect on the ‘libidinal economy’. Standing close to the camera, they assert: ‘As a matrilineal inheritor of the legacy of agrarian radicalism, I deeply resent the contemporary notion of trickle-down sexual morality from the urban context to that of the rural.’ Walshe’s interest in the overlapping politics of sex and colonialism, examined with humour that reveals contradiction, drives the coming two video instalments for EVA next year. The irst, titled Trade School, due for completion in 2021, explores con licts between respectability and sexuality through its main character, a TD (Irish equivalent of an MP) named ‘Puppy’, who is taken on a journey of self-discovery through in idelity and sexual scandal (the video will be distributed on a USB stick by EVA). The trilogy will conclude with Land Cruiser, also due in 2021, which follows a couple on a road-trip across Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021
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Ireland a er they leave over-priced Dublin housing in search of a private place to have sex. Walshe began working on this subject while at the VanAbbemuseum in Eindhoven, initiating ‘the Department of Sexual Revolution Studies’ in 2018 as part of the ‘Deviant Practice Research Programme’ and an elective of the Design Academy Eindhoven creating a public programme of discussions exploring the important role design and architecture play in sexuality. Walshe claims ‘the people who design internal domestic spaces have a huge responsibility, whether they realise it or not, for creating scripts for sexuality’. The research included exploring types of ‘deviant’ sexual terms, such as dogging, cuckolding and hookups, as well as an attempt to instil empathy with uncommon sexualities through role-play. ‘The context of a white liberal national self-identity in the Netherlands meant that it was easier to talk about extreme kink than it was to talk about colonialism,’ Walshe tellingly noted. ‘It was easier to have discussions about gang bangs and dogging than about class and housing.’ If Walshe’s is a critical response to normative structures of power that largely ostracise queer sexual desires and intimate relations, it is also, at a personal level, motivated by the housing precarity Walshe began to experience in their early 20s and which still continues, exacerbated by a sustained housing crisis. Living in close quarters, Walshe experienced irst-hand adverse reactions to their sexuality from the people they were living with. On a state level, Walshe’s expansive practice in sexual politics, particularly in relation to Irish colonial history, is in direct response to the ‘social progress’ the Irish government so o en lays claim to a er recent historic changes, such as the legalisation of gay marriage in 2015, the decriminalisation of abortion in 2018 and the gradual secularisation of state institutions. Corresponding via email from their current lockdown base in Longford, Walshe claims that ‘the increasing respectability of queerness is instrumentalised by our “socially progressive, iscally conservative” government for international PR, and to put a shiny gloss over its own policies of economic violence’. Walshe’s project critically inserts space into this revisionist history. This is more directly explored in GRETTA from 2019, a publication in commemoration of Margaret (Gretta) Cousins, who was born in Boyle in County Roscommon and become ‘a pioneering suffragist, a nationalist, a theosophist, a writer, a publisher, a teacher, a musician, and a vegetarian’. The publication formed part of the radio play I Know Why Women Cry at Weddings, 2019, which Walshe performed at King Boyle House and which combined an anecdotal text by Walshe’s grandmother, Maisie Gately, with an academic paper by Dyuti Chakravarty. Collectively interrogating the domestic politics of marriage, the radio play weaves together a historical and sociological narrative of Cousins’s life in the early 1900s alongside Walshe’s contemporary identity as a ‘non-binary millennial feminist’, forging unexpected parallels and disruptions between lives. Paradox is central to Walshe’s practice, o en demonstrated by centring themselves as a contradictory visual narrator or character ‘in a strategy of depersonalising’. Walshe uses this incongruity as a catalyst to move the work forward. ‘It allows me to show how my voice, my agenda, my particularities are actually an amalgam of many voices and many histories,’ Walshe says. ‘Very quickly these elements of ‘individuation’ are revealed as systemic factors playing over each other.’ For example, in I Know Why Women Cry at Weddings, Walshe’s character, who has never been married or imprisoned, makes the bold claim to Cousins that ‘marriage ought to be outlawed rather than incentivised. If you really must be married, you should be willing to go to prison for it!’ Cousins has been both married and imprisoned. The use of a visual narrator is also found in The Land Question, where the artist assumes different perspectives – most distinctively, the persona of an ‘art school educated, out queer person’ – but remains physically the same. Tackling some of the most timely issues, from unaffordable housing to sexual politics, Walshe’s practice considers alternative sexual narratives as a means of resisting the colonial-driven construction of how Irish people live, one which is ceaselessly framed through the character of Ireland and the Irish landscape. As Walshe asserts, the same conditions for having sex privately are the same conditions needed for any form of physical or auditory activity that requires privacy – such as crying or sleeping – and should be valued as a basic human right. I would also add that Walshe’s biting use of humour throughout their practice, which could so easily undermine the sincerity of their project, exposes the unacceptability of the conditions they observe and experience. In the process, they give us a glimpse of alternative, critical ways of being, not to mention a bit of a laugh. Gwen Burlington is a writer based between Wexford and London. The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, video Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021 15

14

Trade School, production still

I Know Why Women Cry at Weddings, 2019,

performance and sound installation

The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, video

Pro ile Eimear Walshe Gwen Burlington on the Longford-based Irish artist, writer and educator’s interrogation of sexual politics, queer rights, normative structures of power and historical revisionism. Wearing a white dress shirt with hair slicked back and standing in front of a leafy hedgerow in their parent’s rural back garden, Irish artist Eimear Walshe outlines the three necessary conditions for having sex exclusively outdoors: decriminalisation, good faith and viable logistics. This scene marks the opening to the single-channel video work The Land Question: Where the fuck am I supposed to have sex?, 2020, commissioned for the somewhat ill-fated irst phase of the 39th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial of contemporary art, held in Limerick and forced to shut its physical venues because of another Covid-19 lockdown (although Walshe’s video was planned to be also distributed online). Walshe takes a characteristically punkish and lippant role, overturning the sense of the work being a resource of information. But there is also more to their practice than weighing up sexual logistics. Working across sculpture, writing, performance, installation and research, their work is underpinned by queer and feminist trajectories of thought, incorporating beguiling contradictions that are playful and o en deadpan; exploring Ireland’s historically complex relationship with sexuality, marriage and land – three things that Walshe demonstrates as being inextricably linked.

Standing in various rural spaces, such as beside a cattle ield, the side of a road or in an empty ield, Walshe takes us deep into Ireland’s history of the Land Wars (brie ly, agitation on behalf of tenant farmers by the Land League leading to the initiation of the Land Commission in 1881 and subsequent redistribution of land through various Land Acts published into the 20th century). Walshe uses humorous visual examples of key igures, such as paper cut-outs of Lord Leitrim, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, as well as the famous racehorse, Shergar, who plays Walshe’s ‘boyfriend’. Walshe highlights the Land League’s objectives of the three ‘F’s – fair rent, ixity of tenure and freedom of sale – during an unprecedented moment of radical reform which has still not been realised in contemporary Ireland. Walshe cradles a cardboard cut-out of Ireland and, while their voice-over explains these moments in history, they perform exaggerated faces ranging from disinterest to indignance. Walshe makes the case that the colonisation of land and housing has a direct effect on the ‘libidinal economy’. Standing close to the camera, they assert: ‘As a matrilineal inheritor of the legacy of agrarian radicalism, I deeply resent the contemporary notion of trickle-down sexual morality from the urban context to that of the rural.’

Walshe’s interest in the overlapping politics of sex and colonialism, examined with humour that reveals contradiction, drives the coming two video instalments for EVA next year. The irst, titled Trade School, due for completion in 2021, explores con licts between respectability and sexuality through its main character, a TD (Irish equivalent of an MP) named ‘Puppy’, who is taken on a journey of self-discovery through in idelity and sexual scandal (the video will be distributed on a USB stick by EVA). The trilogy will conclude with Land Cruiser, also due in 2021, which follows a couple on a road-trip across

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021

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