MOUNTAIN

Language shapes our structured world, but every sentence we utter is an improvisation. That is the starting point for Irish visual artist, Orla Barry.
She has worked with 57 words, an actor, a dancer and a musician to devise a work in which chance, fate, and a little witchcraft play equal roles. A wheel of fortune stops on a word and this creates various impromptu scenarios, which follow different random orders for each performance of the work. Using forms of text production such as speech, monologue, interview and poem, Barry creates an ellipsis between text, meaning and performance.
Barry’s work focuses on language as well as on visual deconstruction and displacement of language. She researches the semantics of her mother tongue and its cultural imbedding and implications. Her work crosses a wide variety of media, evoking non-linear narratives and undercurrents of emotion.