Slieve Dhu is an Endurance art – audio visual performance that explores the emotional processes involved in personal confrontation.
Slieve dhu, or “Black Mountain” in Irish – is a piece that examines the humility and dysphoria associated with the aforementioned human self-discovery. This inspiration for this piece came whilst experiencing an intense bout of dysphoria and hypochondria. During this period, I found myself feeling constantly humiliated and exhausted. I felt embarrassed about the irrationality of my thoughts, constantly thinking I was on the brink of death or developing a cancerous tumour. To me, I usually find that it’s more common to associate the uncovering of your own body and emotions as a positive thing and the conversation ends there. It’s uncomfortable to talk about and experience the hardships associated with this process. In this piece I wanted to examine the humility and exhaustive, lengthy turmoil that usually comes with these discoveries in a more confrontational manner.
The performance concept is as follows, the large, hollow metal sphere is attached via chain-link to a rotating arm powered by an electrical motor. Sitting at the base of the motor is a sound mixer, a speaker and a sound manipulation board. Connected through the mixer, a contact microphone is placed inside the hollow part of the sphere. As the sphere rotates, it grinds across the floor, creating a harsh and unpredictable sound wall. The performer then gets on their hands and knees and follows the ball around with their head in the sphere’s chamber. The performer then crawls, following the ball until exhaustion. The piece ends when the performer can crawl no further due to exhaustion.
In Slieve Dhu I really wanted to emphasize the exhausting, humiliating and abrasive nature with these irrational health scares. I feel like this piece really demonstrates these thought loops in a way where the performer is in control of exercising them, again playing to the idea of ejecting physical and emotional turmoil.