Hydra Inlaw (2019-20)

Hydra Inlaw (2019) in situ in the Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Co. Louth

A site-specific sculptural installation made for the Highlanes Gallery Drogheda in 2019 for the touring exhibition Elliptical Affinities: Irish women artists and the politics of the body 1984 to the present. This sculpture work was reconfigured when the exhibition toured to the Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2020.

I interpret the verb ‘queering’ as an action that playfully disrupts norms.

The freshwater Hydra is immortal, a hermaphrodite organism that through infinite self-renewal, challenges our perception of biology. They/she has the ability reproduce in three ways, by making buds that clone themselves, through sexual procreation and when injured they dramatically reassemble.

In 1991, Outlaws Inlaws challenged the criminalisation of lesbians and gay men, as part of In a State, an exhibition in Kilmanham Gaol on National Identity. Homosexuality was still a crime in Ireland then, and until 1993. My work in a cell there responded to motifs of chained Celtic serpents guarding the imperialist prison’s entrance. I installed thirty-six plaster relief tiles in a continuous pattern of writhing snakes with two photographs of same sex couples kissing passionately. At this time depictions of binary gay sexualities were a crucial confrontational to laws that rendered us invisible.

The bodily autonomy and sexualities of women and queer people were confined in Ireland by oppressive legislative and religious control. But recent Gender Recognition and Marriage Equality Acts, along with the removal of the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, allows us more freedom to flourish and self-determine.

The snakes, made in protest almost thirty years ago led me to magnify this tiny everlasting polyp into a giant lesbian mother goddess in paper, glue and local willow. Hydra’s multiple tentacles illuminate and tickle hetero-normative identities, celebrating gender, sexuality and desire in pulses of liquid abundance.