About the artist

Emily Ní Bhroin

Emotional Agency

Website / Social Media: www.emilynibhroin.com

“HOW IS YOUR COSTUME AGENTIVE?”

As its folds ripple and collapse, as the performer interacts with it, it performs also: creating set, costume and character(s), while highlighting the strangely similar materiality of folds in bodies, fabric and landscapes.

BIOGRAPHY

Trained on the MA Costume for Performance programme at London College of Fashion, Dublin-based Emily Ní Bhroin has been working and exploring costume for over 13 years. She has worked with internationally renowned companies and artists, for example with Emmy award-winning costume designer Joan Bergin on television and film projects including The Tudors, Vikings and Greta; and with Donatella Barbieri on a costume performance for the Prague Quadrennial 2011. She frequently collaborates with choreographer Philip Connaughton on dance performances in Ireland and in France. She likes to design/make expressionistic costumes that can propel, as well as support, performance.

TITLE: Folded Memoryscape – New Worn Identities

Inspired by two novels, which deal with themes of memory – The Sea by John Banville and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – the costume is based on the concept of folds in clothing, bodies, maps and the land itself, being the points wherein memories might be stored. A friend told me years ago about an idea she had read somewhere, of heaven being located within the folds of a map. This idea stayed with me and was triggered as I explored notions of mapping, blood lines, ancestry, repetition and layering to design a memory-based costume. Deleuze theorised that the world could be understood through the concept of the fold, as elements in the universe aren’t separate but rather exist as fold upon fold or fold within fold. By drawing on these ideas, I sought to produce a memory landscape, created through folds and pleating, within which there are occasional slits to evoke an absent female who exists only in memories.

Materials: crinoline, papier-mâché, cotton organdie, wool, habotai silk, embroidery and hidden lightweight garments.

IMAGE CAPTIONS & CREDITS

01
Performer, Lachlan Blackley, rolls across a landscape or sea of folds, containing memories, including small real garments, hidden in pockets and folds.