Bray Area Partnership Case Study:
Donna McLoughlin
Donna McLoughlin linked in with our Local Employment service in 2007 and has availed of Partnership services since returning to education. She recently graduated with First Class Honours from DIT and is currently studying a Masters in Fine Art at NCAD.
McLoughlin is an interdisciplinary artist and her work continually revisits concepts around the complex condition of being human. Current work comments on the
contemporary climate of Ireland. Performance art has underscored her relationship with the changing landscape of our times and the social spaces that evolve from this. As an artist, McLoughlin’s work explores her own identity as an Irish citizen, and she is happy to assume the role as a citizen / activist artist working from a position of solidarity, as well as a provocateur.
‘Handle with Care’ is a performance piece which took place at the GPO and Henry Street, Dublin. Although the work may seem absurdist, it is concerned with weighty issues such as the Ryan Report and the individual cases of Savita Halappanavar, who may have lived if intervention was forthcoming, and Wicklow woman Marie Fleming, who has MS and lost her case to end her own life.
“As a Catholic, I am very challenged by these individual cases. In my work, I am acting as a provocateur to open up these platforms for discussion. There is a deep tension between dogma and morality – the Letter of the Law versus the Spirit of the Law. In our constitution, the state promises to take care of the individual. Some isolated cases are extremely tricky and need to be treated with the utmost care. I used the GPO as a location to exercise my constitutional right according to Article 40” – which states:
‘The State guarantees liberty for the exercise of the following rights, subject to public order and morality: The right of the citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions’.”
You can see a film about Donna’s ‘Handle with Care’ performance piece at the GPO and Henry Street in Dublin here.