Marie Theresa Crick works with transnational feminisms and breath as ‘performance’. Her practice and research explore, Embodied, Filmic and Collective Practice in dialogue with the philosopher, Luce Irigaray.
Marie Theresa is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher and facilitator (b. Croydon and of Irish descent, which she says with a smile). She is a PhD researcher in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University, fellow of Advanced Practices PhD and members of collectives including the research and practice collective Counterfield, and feminist artistic collective Feminist Breath Collective.
Her practice deals with suspended breath, how we share air, and the gift of future breath. It seeks reorientations of the Irish Catholic maternal, in the mother and daughter relation and asks how we can collectively attend without judgement to the triggering of shame in the bodily, psychic, relational and political.
Her body acts as compass as it ‘returns’ to spaces of the Virgin Mary (physical, archival, personal), moving from witnessing her family’s histories to full attention of her embodied shame. Her body/psyche inhabit the double dislocation of shame, activated from the physic death of a familial trace of leaving Ireland pregnant out of wedlock, to get married in ‘secret’ in London, and the rupturing in the maternal relation. Marie Theresa ‘revisits’ familial ‘performances’ activated by conditions of being Irish Catholic in London from the late 1950s, amplified by the Irish Chaplaincy Scheme.
Dementia has become the unexpected relation in the practice, as she moves with an unfolding choreography with her mother, over the dining room table, navigating the loss of bodily/psychic shame in her mother’s side, whilst she still breathes with the rituals of transgenerational embodied shame. The dance holds grief and laughter in the same breath.
Formed of breath as ‘performances’, in ‘private’ air, ‘public’ air, filmic breath and communal air, breath moves from her body to her mother’s, to collective bodies. By bringing consciousness to our breath, we gesture to the other, commune and return to the self.
She has over twenty years of facilitating experimental horizontal teaching at all levels (Key Stage 1 to 5, and Higher Education,Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels in photography, film, philosophy, fine art and contemporary art theory). Facilitation permeates all her practices to open multi-directional participatory spaces, that put in play atmospheres to share air together without fear, that are rooted in the ‘feminine-to-come’, the within but not yet, to collectively seek relations anew.
