Molly Martin

Belfast School of Art, Ulster University

Project Statement:

Misshapen States

There is nothing more elusive than not experiencing, knowing or relating to your own body.

To function, to control, in a body-mind disconnect, is a difficult concept to comprehend. It is these unconscious, un-lived experiences occurring through my epileptic seizures that allow me to explore the concepts of consciousness and control through using my body as a performative tool.

Misshapen States is a performance-based piece that pushes at and experiments with the sensed boundaries of the body and mind. It explores a process involving strategies of endurance in intense environmental and physical situations to consciously induce states of involuntary movement. These encounters with place offer me the possibility to explore and consider the self as a body, an object, an obstacle. 

This work is an explorative attempt at connection with the most intense experiences my body as a vessel has had, while outside my conscious state. Using performance both corporeally and vocally brings a physicality to something elusive in my embodied experience that I have not, and will not, ever reach.

In our everyday, we rarely consider our degrees of consciousness. It is with this work that I invite a questioning of ‘being’ through piecing together an audible and optical tracing of this experience.

– Molly Martin

Artist Bio:

Molly Martin is an Irish visual artist based in Belfast with a strong background in the arts. Her practice combines a mix of photography, video and performance. She focuses largely on personal themes, using endurance and the body as a performative tool. Martin’s work reflects the relationship with her body, posing questions of consciousness and control, objectivity and the body as obstacle. She is a graduate of Ulster University with a BA (Hons) in Photography with Video and International Study from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.