Domestic Bodies Áine Phillips and collaborators

‘Domestic Bodies’, an exhibition of performative installations, video screenings and photographic images by Áine Phillips and collaborators Vivienne Dick, Ella Bertilsson, and Emily Lohan. Three distinct works were located in dialogue with each other in the space, their themes and subject matter converging and interwoven, all addressing female experience in relation to domestic space.

Embedded with Ella Bertilsson explores comfort, shelter and safe resting place. In the Robing Room with Vivienne Dick considers the struggles of women’s bodies in Irish social history especially in the last century under Catholicism. Red Couch/ Archeology with performer Emily Lohan enacts with humour and transcendence, the symbolic immersion of a woman into the underbelly of domesticity.

These works engage with conflicting meanings of the domestic sphere. As a space of safety and security, it can also be suffocating or engulfing and if violent, dangerous to women and children. However in these performative scenes the female subject always finds a way to surpass and eclipse her struggles and oppression.

These works aim to push the limits and potentials of domestic things to create metaphors for female subjectivity and experience. The exhibition as a whole confronts the pleasures, discontents and struggles of habitation: finding, keeping, and the meaning of home.

Live performances took place at the opening of the exhibition (24 May) animating the installations and the video documentation of these events were screened in the gallery for the duration of the show.

About the Artists:

Áine Phillips
Áine Phillips has been making performances, sculptural installations and art films since the late 80s in Ireland and internationally. She has exhibited her work in multiple contexts: public space, social events, galleries, theatres, museums, biennales and film festivals. Her work often involves collaborations with Irish and international artists. Curating, writing and teaching are also part of her diverse practice. She holds a doctorate in performance art from the National College of Art and Design Dublin and is a senior lecturer at Burren College of Art in County Clare. Her critically acclaimed edited volume Performance Art in Ireland: A History was published by Intellect Books/ LADA London in 2015. Her work is collected by the National Museum of Ireland and Galway Museum. Recent shows and screenings in 2024 include Tulca Visual Art Festival and 126 Gallery Galway and Rua Red Performance Festival South Dublin Arts Centre, Block Artspace, Kansas City Arts, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Fundacio de Arte Medinaceli, Soria Spain and The Art Center, Dover, New Hampshire.


Ella Bertilsson
Born 1982 in Umeå, Northern Sweden, Ella Bertilsson works in Dublin and Callan, Ireland. Her artworks explore sensory and visceral experiences, reflecting life transitions, escapism, and mental health through thoughts, emotions, memories, and the body. Working across - sculpture, film, drawing, and painting - audiences are invited into staged realms, installations and performances that incorporate dark humour, magical realism, and absurdity.

Selected solo exhibitions include: The Horse, Dublin (2025); Ballina Art Centre, Mayo (2024); The Dock, Leitrim (2023-24) and The Complex, Dublin (2022). Selected group shows include: Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Dublin (2025); Rua Red Gallery, Dublin (2024-2025); Charlemont Square, Dublin (2024); Luan Gallery, Athlone (2024); The Lab Gallery, Dublin (2024) and The Library Project, Dublin (2023). Selected performances: Linen Hall, Mayo (2025); 126 Gallery, Galway (2024); TBG+S, Dublin (2024); Galway Art Centre, Galway (2023) and IMMA, Dublin (2023). Ella Bertilsson is recognised as a Next Generation Artist by The Arts Council of Ireland (2023-2024). Her work is included in The Office of Public Works State Art Collection.


Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick is an internationally celebrated filmmaker and artist. Born in Donegal, Ireland in 1950, she was a key figure within ‘No Wave’, avant-garde scene in New York in the late seventies and has gone on to develop a body of work which has been shown in many festivals, museums and art galleries worldwide, most recently at Hawaii Triennial 2025. Recent Retrospectives and surveys include Queer Porto, 2023, Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2021, The Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017. Group shows include A.I.R. NYC, 2025. Women in Revolt, Tate Britain, 2024, Who Are You Staring At, at the Centre Pompidou in 2023. Her documentary New York Our Time, received the Dublin Film Critics Award in 2020. Dick’s work is marked by an interest in urban street life, gender and social politics, ecology and possible futures. Dick’s films are distributed by LUX London and The Film Maker’s Cooperative, New York.

Emily Lohan
Emily Lohan is a Galway-based artist whose work explores the interplay between autonomy and connection, continuity and transience, through performance art, drawing, and painting. Utilising her body as both subject and medium, she draws on presence, gesture, and endurance to create intimate encounters. In 2024, she was selected for a residency at Áras Éanna, funded by The Arts Office, Galway City Council. In February 2025 she performed a solo work titled PARTING, as well as a group performance, EORNA, at The Model, Sligo, designed by Sandra Corrigan Breathnach. She is a Co-Director of 126 Artist-Run Gallery where she has curated multiple exhibitions and events, a performance art event FITE FUAITE in April 2025 with Co-Director Ciara Corscadden Hennessy. Emily Lohan was the curator of Domestic Bodies when it was presented at 126 Artist-Run Gallery in Galway in 2024.