“I am an emerging interdisciplinary visual & performance artist of Irish & Trinidadian descent & co-founder of Origins Eile.
My performance work probes the intersection between visual art, music & social practice. I merge textiles, movement, sound, and written text to explore legacies of colonial violence. I am interested in the transformative potential of performance, and the possibilities for practicing and thereby accessing liberation. I create immersive sound environments and visual textural sensory experiences, through an improvisational and responsive interdisciplinary practice.
More personally, I am Queer NonBinary & Black Biracial artist, performer, poet, singer, podcaster, textile artist, illustrator, producer, performer, community organiser. My practice has many different strands that I draw on & interweave. I like to read, I love to move, I meditate, I feel deeply connected to the ocean and the sun, I am learning to be more playful, I am learning to listen better.
Ancestrally, both my parents were born and bred in Trinidad & Tobago; Portuguese / Irish on one side, Black or Afro-Trini on the other. I grew up in Ireland but I spent some of my early childhood and most of my summers in Trinidad & Tobago and recently lived there for nearly 2 years as an adult- I have a deep sense of love and connection to the place. My heritage shapes who I am, which in turn shapes my work, frames much of my research and defines my practice.
Given the violent colonial histories of both Trinidad & Ireland, my practice is about finding pathways to liberation both personally and collectively. I am particularly interested in using song as a critical access point into both personal and political dialogue because of its relationship to Black liberation and Irish resistance movements and diasporic modes of cultural preservation and connection. I am interested in exploring sound & performance as a portal, as time-travel, as antidote & medicine, as a resting place, as liberation.” – Maïa Nunes
