Ann Conmy
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betwixt and between, 2025 -
the seam between one thing and another, 2025
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“she went back to the water of course, of course; but they say around here, you know, that some nights she comes.....up to the house and combs the youngsters hair", 2025
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Watery bodies, 2025
Ann is an artist living and working in Co. Mayo. She is currently a Ph.D candidate through fine arts practice at the Limerick School of Art and Design. Her practice encompasses photography, sound and expanded textiles. She works with varied processes combined to create multi-sensory immersive installation. The aim of her practice is to story-tell and transform feelings, ideas and thinking about the human as embedded; rather than separate from ecology and society.
She has previously shown work at the RHA annual show and presented a solo show in 2024 titled "Port a Beul" / "Tunes by the mouth". Port à Beul re-visits archival recordings of "lilting" or "Gob Music" exploring the colonial, transgressive and celebratory narratives around the tradition of lilting in Ireland. When musical instruments were banned in Ireland under Penal law (1695) it become popular as a means to entertain, celebrate and perform; embodying a refusal to be dominated by
the imperial regime.
Her practice currently explores watery spaces as sites of entanglement, where bodies, beings, and matter intra-act. Humans relate to water routinely through an extractive paradigm. The aim is to re-imagine and contextualize water as an embodied relational material that can sustain life and be sustained healthily itself by reducing anthropogenic harms to it and its biomes.
Drawing on ecofeminist and posthuman theory, she understands the sea as both material and metaphor, tracing parallels between the visual-cultural production of the monstrous feminine and ecological abjection, asking how patriarchal and neoliberal systems generate and sustain both. In this context, the monstrous is not a site of horror, but a generative force; one that enables new hyphenated assemblages of relation to emerge.
Through photography, sound art and expanded textiles she creates acts of becoming: becoming water, becoming other, being wet. Employing a heterotopic aesthetic that responds to experiences of outsider- ness and re-imagines subjectivity as porous, relational, and fluid. Outsider ness in this instance can be understood as those who feel marginalized based on race, gender, sexuality or disability. It equally applies to the alterity projected onto more-than-human species, matter and biomes resulting in ecocide.