The Sweets Of Sin, 2023_Performance Art. Image credit Stephen White
Arlene Caffrey
Born and raised in rural Co. Louth, Arlene is a visual artist, dance artist and adult educator now based in Kilkenny. Working across performance, sculpture and the written word, her practice is informed by feminine subjectivity with elements of humour.
Her research-led practice explores embodied experience and identity. One expression of this is dancing on 8-inch chocolate sculptural stilettos in her work The Sweets of Sin (2023), where she invites the audience to eat the shoes in a playful interrogation of signifiers, power and consumption.
Her work reflects the shifting cultural and socio-political landscape of contemporary Ireland, shaped by feminist and gender identity theory. Through performance and sculpture, she examines her position as a rural Irish woman within these contexts, seeking to provoke thought around constructs of femininity and embodiment.
She is also a member of Live Art Ireland, Tipperary, and her practice has been supported by ArtLinks, Kilkenny Arts Office and Research Ireland.
Artist Statement:
Arlene's current research investigates embodied experience and self-expression within a performance art context. Her PhD project Revisioning Contemporary Performance Art: The Vernacular of Pole Dancing as a Site of Contested and Reimagined Identities, explores how pole dancing - a vernacular cultural form - can serve as a movement methodology for interrogating embodiment and identity in a fine art performance art context.
This includes investigating how the space between these two forms of performance, the vernacular and the fine art, creates a site of becoming, for the discovery of a new genre of embodied expression. In the space between what is perceived as ‘high art’ and ‘low art’, can a hybrid or new practice emerge informed by both?
The research context is the changing cultural and socio-political landscape of contemporary Ireland, where feminism and gender-identity theory have influenced an evolving idea of embodied expression. It will address how vernacular modalities of performance art can inform contemporary Irish performance art, embodied experience and subjectivity. Here performance art is the site of discovery, creation and expression of both the individual and socio-political self within culture.