Supernatural Bread – Bridget O’Gorman

Project Visual Arts is pleased to present a reading of a work in progress by Project research support recipient, Bridget O’Gorman, followed by a conversation with Iarlaith Ni Fheorais.

In order to have the strength to contemplate affliction when we are afflicted we need supernatural bread.

Taking its title from a quote by French philosopher Simone Weil, this text seeks to locate the complicated and intimate experiences of vulnerability between the everyday and the supernatural. As a disabled artist and mother, I have often found myself in a state of dissociation: the compromised, disconnected reality between ‘the then and the now’ – what I used to be as opposed to what I am. Art galleries offer an ‘otherwise’ space within which we might detach from our own lives to pay close attention to some other world. In this essay, dissociation, often categorised by conventional medicine as a form of illness, is pursued as an act of empowerment: a way of contemplating the potential of the esoteric in re-imagining our bodies and the domestic and institutional environments they inhabit.

Detachment, slowness, stillness become a means of resistance and transformation towards a new order of things. Thinking about the lives of both real and fictional protagonists such as Leonora Carrington, Gluck and Reality Flickers, the essay explores the work of those who have side-stepped the space-time constraints of the lives to which they have been assigned. Reclaiming ruptures in our daily experiences, it proposes the gallery as a site which either enables or disables access to a lifeworld that endures beyond the limitations of the body and the institution.

After the reading Bridget will be joined by Iarlaith Ni Fheorais for a brief conversation and audience Q&A.

This reading will take place on Zoom, all are welcome.

AI closed captions will be enabled for this event.