I am an artist and art worker from Dublin, currently based between Dublin and Brussels. My practice is collaborative and moves between performance, visual art, writing and organising. Previous work includes a human choir that performed for cows; an interactive fantasy about the politics of housing in Dublin; a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers that I made with my dad; and performances and other invitations for lamp posts, zoom calls, U-bahn stations and apartments. I am primarily concerned with examining existing social rules and structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using performance and other live situations as a testing ground for experiments in different ways of relating. Much of my recent work has focused on the creation of frameworks for playful encounter, exchange, and co-creation, such as the group improvisation practice messing, the platform for collaboration You and Me, an Anger Club, and a first manifestation of a practice-sharing space for women and non-binary multimedia artists called In practice(s): The wood and the trees.
I studied Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin and the Freie Universität Berlin, and Youth Arts at Maynooth University. In 2021 I completed a Masters of Fine Art in Autonomous Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK), Ghent. I have previously worked as a art/science communicator and workshop facilitator at Science Gallery Dublin (2018-2020), and remain active as an art worker, most recently at manoeuvre, a co-creative atelier for visual arts based in Rabot, Ghent (2021-2022). I have also been involved in a number of collective projects in recent years, including the Truck Stop Cultural Centre, Door to Door, the para-institute for art and precarity (pKp), and One Field Fallow. I am currently a recipient of an Arts Participation Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and am an Artist in Residence at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute on the research project Data Stories, which will critically map Irish housing and property data.
Say hi at somersdj@tcd.ie