How did you become artists and what areas do you work in?
Sinead
I work in the visual arts. I mostly work with sound and performance art, in the Fine Arts definition of performance art. I do a little bit of video, but mostly I do installations and it’s a research based practise where I analyse academic texts or popular culture or media outlets and I usually make a piece of work as a commentary on what emerges from my research.
Gemma
I am a Theatre Maker and while I work predominantly within a performance background, I also make things. I think people often forget that theatre makers have practical skills as well, in terms of making tangible things, so it’s not just about being involved in performances.
How do you connect with the work of Dr Jane Monkton Smith?
Gemma
That was a bit of an accident really. I had wanted to work with Sinead and I didn’t really know how to make that happen. The two of us come from two different disciplines and we had to find a way to allow a project to progress. We had started that process but we hadn’t quite worked out what the specific project would be. We were exploring possibilities.
Now, I was working on renovating my house and while doing that I was listening to every available podcast ever made and I stumbled on the BBC Podcast, “Assume Nothing – Femicide – Eight Steps to Stop a Murder”.
Immediately after listening to it, my mind was completely blown. I contacted Sinead and suggested she listen to the podcast. I was fizzing with energy off the back of the podcast and I was thinking about how we could produce something together. It just took off from there.
The two of us were energised by that podcast and from there we started having conversations about what we might make in response to the issues raised in the podcast. The whole idea of just being exploratory with perhaps no end goal in sight just went out the window.
Creativity was bursting out of us regarding Doctor Jane Monckton Smith’s work, which was referred to throughout the podcast, we just wanted to create something from her ground-breaking analysis on Femicide.
Sinead
We just couldn’t believe how much information was available, the level of detail that the podcast went into, and it just seemed incredible that people didn’t know about this.
Gemma
We just kept saying to each other, “How did we not know this?” If we said that once we said that infinite times and the strange thing was that everybody would say to us, “Is this not really depressing?”
Now obviously there is the situation where you are looking at the systematic abuse resulting ultimately in the deaths of these women, and we were spending time in the world of these dead women, but we were now looking deeply at this situation, we were on fire with new facts. And once you know about this analysis, it means that you can see it everywhere. In fact you start constantly pointing things out, you start seeing things everywhere. You do ask yourself, “How are we still being fed this nonsense from coercive and controlling men?”
There was a case just recently where a woman committed suicide and her former partner was taken to a court with a leading female barrister who was able to argue that the woman was just seeking attention and he got off.
This leading female barrister, who proudly declares herself a feminist barrister, was repeating all the same tropes and she was able to win that case. This was despite the fact that the woman in question had reported the abuse she was being subjected to, right, left and centre. This just blows my mind when we have the tools to see through all this crap, when we know what the issues are.
Sinead
I feel that was as well. There is something about the installation that we are really conscious of, that you are asking people to come into it knowing that people will start to analyse their own relationships and the people around them and their relationships, which I think is a good thing.
It might also be the case that some people come into the installation not realising that they are experiencing a coercive and controlling relationship and they might not realise they are in danger, because women often underestimate just how high the threat towards them might be.
That could be quite a shock for people to experience this information and then realise that they could be living in a very dangerous space.
To see more of the work of Gemma Mae Halligan and Sinéad O’Neill-Nicholl
