pass the baton

Galway Arts Centre presents pass the baton, a collaborative exhibition by artists Laura O’Connor and Léann Herlihy that draws on personal histories of competitive sport and performance to interrogate ideas of identity, nationalism and bodily resilience. Together, the artists challenge dominant narratives of strength, highlighting the tensions between endurance and resistance through embodied research, sculpture, installation and performance.
Laura O’Connor is a visual artist and lecturer based in Belfast. Her work explores gendered representations in the media and within cultural narratives through the mediums of performance, sculpture, installation, video and digital media. The work for pass the baton combines O’Connor’s childhood experiences of being in a marching band and all the precision training that goes into achieving straight lines and synchronised routines with the weight that symbols such as flags hold in contemporary society. Considering how the meaning of emblems and symbols have been blurred and co-opted to suit certain arguments (often counter to those once intended) de-saturation of colours is achieved through fine porcelain, and over-saturation occurs in red satin flags. Repetition and drill is used throughout the work in the form of wallpaper, erupting flag formations and choreography. O’Connor’s determination to performatively stay in line ultimately falls apart, in many ways a symbol of where we are and how towing the line isn’t an option.
Léann Herlihy is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin. Unravelling the austere entanglements of surveillance and policing of trans* bodies, Herlihy actively subverts trans* exclusionary tactics steered by a moral panic for public “safety” by highlighting the urgency of queer and trans* self-defence clubs in preserving community existence. Recognising the body as a revolutionary site for the production, retention and transformation of knowledge, Herlihy pulls from the muscle memory built during their training in trans-led self-defence spaces, anti-fascist fight clubs and martial arts gyms over the last three years. With a deep desire for their practice to be perpetually held in a slippery sweat-saturated grip, this body of work bashfully attempts to recreate the atmospheres permeated in these community training spaces; from a dimly lit Dyke fight club to the brightly-lit community-halls-turn-fight-rings. Cheering on the legion of strained bodies–those who resist flexibility in favour of justice–, dupes of archival sports fan memorabilia, deconstructed mascot costumes and coach stadium chairs are scattered throughout the gallery, cultivating complex and nuanced narratives regarding the subjectivity of gender minorities and their ongoing liberation.
Refusing disciplinary coherence, Herlihy’s research dwells in the often incompatible and unarchived fragments physically found at the back of storage rooms or virtually spiraling down the threads of online forums as they scavenge for remnants of those who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional academic studies.