Sullivan uses military installations to create challenging site-specific work, writes Glenn Loughran
M ary Sullivan is an emerging performance artist and islander whose impressive body of work turns a critical lens on the complex history of women’s labour and island life. The energy and ambition of the work are played out in large-scale artistic performances located at key sites around the island on which she lives, Bere Island, off Co Cork. Like many islands in the ‘age of empire’, Bere is peppered with military installations, which indicate convergent narratives of colonisation, suppression and insurrection. Often absent from these historical narratives are the various ways that women have contributed to island life and, in particular,how women’s labour has been suspiciously misrecognised.
