Audiovisual

Performance

Poetry

In May of 2023, our friend Paul Swan launched his first book of poems at The Patriot’s Inn, in Inchicore, as part of the yearly Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival.

Paul invited me, and two other artist friends, to contribute a work to the launch.

I selected a poignant poem from Paul’s book; L’Etranger. As a perennial foreigner, the poem’s thematic felt close to home. The growing atmosphere of nationalism and racism both in Ireland and world wide, together with the tragic ongoing deaths of migrants at sea, especially in my home country of Italy and in Greece, (where authorities often allow for these drownings to happen and humanitarian workers rescuing refugees from death by drowning are prosecuted), made this poem particularly important to me.

I performed in the pub and the whole night was a powerful experience, but the light conditions in the venue made video recording of the event impossible.

My son suggested making a version of the performance for video, possibly outdoors, by the sea.

Paul Swan enlisted the help of videographer Joey Cleary and with the help of my husband Nigel Wood, we filmed the performance in Curracloe beach, in Co wexford.

The video file lay in wait for some time, until recently, during a conversation with  friend and fellow artist, Marco Gutierrez, he offered to edit the video. Marco’s work goes beyond technical editing, his arts background and practice brings an aesthetic awareness to the work and he contributed with editing decisions which have enhanced the outcome.

It is to be noted that all working on this project are doing so on a voluntary basis. My gratitude to Paul, Joey, Nigel and Marco for their invaluable work in the making of this new performance video, which has yet to be exhibited publicly.

The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival, The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

L’Etranger

Collaboration

Thunderous Silence takes its name from a Buddhist notion; the potentiality of all sounds being inherent in apparent silence. Both Thunderous silence and luminous void  refer to an "empty fullness" in Buddhist philosophy.

In this short audio piece, the artists summon nature through its sounds, layering it with human voice and everyday sounds to create a "wave", rising from gentle to culminate in a fierce, thunderous auditory cacophony....and back down to silence.

In the historical setting of Fossanova, this work proposes a dialogue between nature and culture, human and non-human, male and female. 

There is a nod to the figure of Thomas Aquinas, and to his terror of thunder and lightning. The artists suggest that a fear of nature and of the feminine underly much of the western cultural canon, and present us, in this work, with the power and the awe inspiring presence of the physical, natural world.

A series of discussions with Brendan Fox in Dublin stimulated ideas — Catizone used a 14 metres long fluorescent green piece of fabric. She constructed a simple tunic, with a long train, to be used at the Giulianello lake.

Nigel Wood selected a soundtrack for the performance; 30 minutes of music primarily from the traditions of trance Italian music, such as Taranta as well as electronic music and mournful ballads. The sound track was subdivided into: Music for the forest, to be played during the procession-like walk through the beautiful forest before arriving at the lake, and then music for the lake.

Giulianello lake was the setting of a singular filming of 

, by Helios film company from Velletri, where a large number of local people acted as extras in an epic movie that evoked Bosh’s 

, which her grandmother used to read to her, were stirred by this. The performance took place in the rain, on the one and only rainy day in Lazio during July ’23. Despite this, people turned up, and followed as if in a procession. 

Walking through the forest was followed by full immersion in the water. The artist engaged in movements that evoked local old trades and domestic occupation: Fishing, washing clothes in the lake.

The public's response was generous and affectionate, with many reporting that memories of grandparents at work had been evoked.

Giulianello lake was retrieved by a group of citizens a few years ago from private ownership and returned to the people and to nature. It is now a protected natural area with wild boar, birds and water snakes.

The project was, in the words of Brendan Fox, an “artistic homecoming” for me. Driving around the Roman countryside and visiting places I used to frequent with my family as a child was deeply evocative and healing, allowing me to mend a partially lost and fractured relationship with my beloved country of origin, in particular with Rome, my birth city, and its countryside.

That this homecoming was mediated through my art- making and collaborations, personally resonates in many meaningful ways. The work that resulted from this convergence of past and present is documented here.

The performance was a ritual of celebration of place, memory, people and nature.

Lazio, Italy

Sleepertown Art Trail

Sleepertown, Fossanova Abbey and Lago di Giulianello, Lazio, Italy

Thunderous Silence

Installation

Sculpture

Water pollution, especially by plastic, is a recurring theme in Catizone’s work.

Light, Plastic, Water, a video previously created by Catizone and featuring a sound track by Robin Sherry Wood

For Sculpture in Context 2018, in Dublin’s Botanical Gardens, Catizone displayed Light, Plastic, Water video and soundtrack, as well as her sculptural works, made with up-cycled plastic to create an immersive environment.

The series of three performances sought to activate the space with a necessary sense of loss for our diminished environment and also with play and hope for appropriate action. Participants were invited to observe, to follow in a procession to the stream, where an old bottle of holy water, found in an abandoned house, was poured into the living water running through the Gardens. Viewers were then invited to return to the exhibition space for a conversation on our experiences of the ecological crisis.

The use of UV light during the performance referred  to the fluorescence  of deep sea creatures. Lists of names of extinct and at risk water flora and fauna were written in ultraviolet ink and were sourced from the Marine Life section of the 

The artist adopted the persona of Grandmother Water which allowed her to embody concern for  future generations on this planet.  The symbiotic relationship between the human body and water  ( cellular, inter cellular, lymph, blood, cerebro-spinal, synovial fluids  etc....) were explored during the movement sequences in the performances.

Most people worry about the planet, allowing open discussion and a ritualised set of gestures facilitated the groups to connect to feelings of sadness, grief  and fear. This emotional awareness is the foundation of all ecological activism, whether through art or direct action.

The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Sculpture in Context

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Being Water

Catizone and DJ Nigel Wood were  invited to perform together at the Body & Soul festival 2017.

Artist and DJ collaborated by listening  to a lot of music together and choosing a two hour worth of trance inducing, ferocious ethnic sounds.  In the  live performance, Catizone  moved  uninterruptedly  while drawing with two hands and using UV markers and UV lights,  to “draw with light” on a large sheet of paper on board.

The resulting drawing is a record of movement and of the sound that prompted it.

It was the end of the solstice and the artist ritualised the performance,  burning sage and marking the four directions, and using animal skulls, plants and other power objects.

In the magic of the Pagoda woodland area at Body & Soul, a crowd gathered to watch, dance and celebrate.

Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Body & Soul Festival

Body & Soul Festival, Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Solstice

Over several months in 2015, Paola used contact microphones to amplify the sound of gestural drawing and Robin Sherry Wood responded with his electronic music. This intensive practice resulted in Elements, a collaborative, largely improvisational performance, which relied on some basic movement and sounds parameters.

Elements was first showcased at The Sonic Laboratory, in the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast, in 2015, as part of Sherry Wood’s Masters assessment. The event was received with great interest and the opportunity to collaborate again came up at Foundation16, curated by Brendan Fox in Tullamore in 2016. The work activated the exhibition space and was captured by video.

The body of the performer mediates between mark making and sound technology. Emerging from a minimal choreographic starting point, based on simple movement parameters, an improvised exploration develops. The span of the artists’ body determines the shape and scale of the drawing, while her movements and the contact of the graphite with the paper are made audible through the microphones.

This work examines an engagement with listening as experienced by both artists and the audience, it invites both embodiment and sound making into the realm of the visual. A dialogue based on rhythm and sound unfolds between the collaborating artists as they perform.

F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Culture Night

Culture Night, F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Elements

After exploring performative drawings for years, Catizone moved away from the use of hand- held drawing materials to use the whole body as the means of mark making.  

Based on a dance exploration aimed at sensitising the skin, the movement sequence employed involved bringing the entire surface of the body in touch with the graphite powder placed on  the drawing surface which was in turn secured onto the gallery floor.

This project consisted of a series of seven performances, one every day. One of seven hand made white dresses was used on each performance , and was transformed from pure white to dusty black, until, one by one, at the end of the seven days, all dresses had been darkened.

Each performance was filmed daily and added to the projection in the space, increasing the duration of the video and engaging with time as a working  element.

Performance props and traces were accumulated to build an installation.

An edited version of Smudge was selected and  shown as part of RAW, a  performance art online exhibition organized by the performance collective Bbeyond in January of  2021.

Bbeyond Performance Collective, Online

RAW virtual exhibition

Satellite Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Motley

A4 Gallery, Thomas Street, Dublin, Ireland

NCAD MFA Show

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Smudge

Drawing

“Drawing is not a window on the world but a device for understanding our place in the universe”

Catizone’s work is the fruit of an ongoing practice that has been developing over several years. She became interested in drawing during her BA, when she started producing large drawings.

Scale added a physical element to her work,  with the artist drawing on her background in movement and dance. The large scale of the drawings  also gave an immersive feel to the process, a sense of being within the drawing, sensing its lines kinesthetically rather than visually controlling them from the outside.

The work gradually became more embodied, and she began to use choreographic parameters to give structure to long sessions of drawing. These became more performative, with the process as much part of the work as the finished pieces. She soon began to interact and collaborate with dancers, choreographers and musicians.

A number of students and dance professionals volunteered to work with Catizone in the Students Gallery in NCAD in March of 2013. The work was documented in film and, together with the drawings made, used for an exhibition in Pallas Projects in May of 2013.

The discordances between live, mediated, natural and unnatural are at the center of this work. The artist  questions the claims of authenticity and truthfulness in art: is live performance more real than video? Does the ‘halo’ of authenticity lend value to a work of art?  How much can we trust what we see? Especially when reality and information are mediated through the lenses, the editing tools and the technological apparatuses of contemporary media.

The ephemerality and directness of performative drawing responds to current values of chronic socio/economic uncertainty and of media filtering of truth. In drawing, direct experience and impermanence are proposed to the viewer, who becomes witness to the live emergence of lines.

This is contrary to tradition where drawing and painting have taken place in isolation, in the privacy of the studio. Through immediate gestures marks are conveyed without effects or technical artifice, in a quest for a truthfulness of mark making and of presence.

Embodied drawing has its roots in the practice of a line of artists like Robert Morris, Morgan O’Hara and Matthew Barney to name a few.

A performance in collaboration with DJ Nigel Wood and Choreographer Fiona Quilligan took place during the month of the exhibition.

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Natural Aritifice

Permanent collection. Garter Lane Museum, Waterford, Ireland

Untitled (two-hand drawing)

Natural Artifice

Ian Nolan and Paola Catizone collaborated to produce a film based on Paola’s two-hand drawing  performative  practice.

Catizone held multiple graphite sticks in each hand to create  complex drawings based on simple choreographic parameters:

Arm span determining the scale of the drawing

Repetition and rhythm underlying the movements

Nolan overlapped three layers of video to create the illusion of three identical female figures moving and drawing together,  reminiscent of the layering methods used in drawing and painting, with an hypnotic effect.

The spider-like triple figure that emerged seemed to be weaving a thick web of lines, patiently building through repetition.  Catizone’s notion of art- making as a meditative practice and of weaving as a metaphor for  repairing and healing are embodied in this work.

Nataraja is the many armed god of dance, one of the emanations of the god Shiva in the Hindy tradition. Catizone’s four decades of work as a yoga and movement facilitator influenced the spirit of the two hand drawings, which were at first performed to the sound of Indian Ragas.

For Collaborations 2014, Nataraja was  projected on a large sheet of Fabriano paper and presented  with  an accompanying  set of choreographic drawing directions and chunks of graphite for public use. The work became interactive, with public participation filmed and edited into the original video,and incorporated into the projection.

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Collaborations

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Nataraja

Catizone displayed a set of large, performative, two-hand drawings which she made over the space of two years. The drawings were made to either live music or to a selection of tracks curated by DJ Nigel Wood.

Wood played at the opening and a recorded selection of tracks used for the making of the drawings were played in the gallery for the week.

Choreographer Fiona Quilligan performed an embodied response to the work on the opening night also.

A short talk and Q&A session took place after the performance.

Pallas Projects/Studios, Dublin, Ireland

Body Drawings

Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland

It took months of meticulous hand crafting to upcycle the hundreds of collected plastic bottles used in the sculptural aspect of the exhibition. The patient, craft-like repetitive movements used through this process had meditative, performative qualities.  The performance was a ritual  offering to the polluted waters of our lakes, seas and waterways.  The geometrical beauty of diatoms, the smallest water based life forms inspired the sculptural forms. A large, blue, hanging sculpture, made of cut and heated plastic bottles, became the “Waterfall”.

Plastic watery beings populated the exhibition space, with the transparency and clarity of plastic reflecting materially on the appearance of water. A reflective wall, made of fishing tackle, was woven, by repeatedly climbing and kneeling down from ceiling to floor, in a ritualistic, performative set of actions.

A long video: ‘Light, Plastic Water,’ was filmed by the artist in three locations, all of which she considered home. The film features the  heavily polluted stream running through the Landstown Valley, near the artist home in South Dublin, streams near Ashford, Co Wicklow, where she spent time caretaking an abandoned house, and the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, as they lapped the shores of Las canteras beach, in her mother’s native Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria.

As an embodiment facilitator, Catizone has an awareness of the prominence of the element of water in the human body, our most enduring and essential home.

Robin Sherry Wood composed the soundtrack for Light, Plastic Water, creating two sound pieces for two different versions of the video.

The artist's daughters, Francesca and Amy, and even her little dog, Oscar, appear in 

, a home video that takes its name from the title of a poem by EECummins. The two  women’s readings see an overlapping of Sweet Spontaneous with an excerpt from a book by environmental scientist David Attemborough, building up to a chaotic crescendo. They wear head pieces made of up-cycled plastic.


Light, Plastic, Water is a meditation on plastic pollution of our waters and our bodies. It hopes to move viewers to take action on plastic production and waste.

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

NCAD Graduate Show

NCAD Graduate Show, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Light, Plastic, Water

Kevin (Dancing in heaven, entertaining angels)

Dance

In 2007, Catizone was working at Arklink, an arts project for children run by The Ark at Fatima Mansions, in Dublin. Her close friend, Maeve Halpin, was at the time the director of Care Local, an organisation caring for elderly people living alone in Dublin. 

Paola spoke to dancer friends, both hers and her children, and to one of Maeve’s friends, an elderly man who attended dance classes in Rathmines church. She planned and organised a number of local venues and invited a number of people to participate in the making of this video. She then invited videographer Jimmy Reynolds to film the encounters.

The video was shot in a variety of locations, including the old Fatima Mansions, The Oblates in Inchicore, and Maeve’s house in Rathmines. Reynolds contributed the breakdancing section, filmed in a community centre in South Dublin.

The video was shown at an exhibition in the then Juice restaurant, and the proceeds of sales went to Care Local. It was later also shown at Mudra, Catizone’s solo exhibition at the Italian Cultural institute in Dublin in 2008.

The aim of this work is to convey the healing and connecting power of movement and dance, one of humanity’s earliest forms of celebration, communication and expression. Dance can be embraced at any age, and dancing  doesn’t require special skills or virtuosity, just a sense of being alive, in the body in the present moment. To dance is to be human.

Paola Catizone

Audiovisual

L’Etranger, 2023

Culture Date with Dublin 8 Arts Festival, The Patriot’s Inn, Dublin, Ireland

Thunderous Silence, 2023

Sleepertown, Fossanova Abbey and Lago di Giulianello, Lazio, Italy

Being Water, 2018

Sculpture in Context, The National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, Ireland

Solstice, 2017

Body & Soul Festival, Ballinlough Castle, Westmeath, Ireland

Elements, 2016

Culture Night, F16, Tullamore, Offaly, Ireland

Smudge, 2014

NCAD MFA Show, A4 Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Natural Artifice, 2014

Soma Contemporary, Waterford, Ireland

Nataraja, 2014

Collaborations, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Body Drawings, 2013

Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland

Light, Plastic, Water, 2012

NCAD Graduate Show, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

About dancing and Growing Old Gracefully, 2007

Juice Restaurant, Dublin, Ireland