Work
Robert Hartpole Goes Home
Bodyverses
Bodyverses is an ongoing series of filmic works which began in 2024 and are set to be released periodically starting from June 2025. It employs mainly 16mm and Super 8mm film.
The project features both established and emerging performance artists and organisations based in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The films reflect on the significance of performance art, honouring its emphasis on presence, simple yet impactful actions, and body language, while also capturing the process of creating objects and the use of everyday, simple, or found materials. These works explore themes of overcoming both collective and personal trauma, while fostering direct connections between performers and audiences in public spaces.
The collaborations within Bodyverses explore the evolving relationship between performance and medium, where film is not merely a means of documentation, but a vital component of the performances themselves. At the core of Bodyverses lies a commitment to personal connection and encounters developed over extended periods of time.
Bodyverses: Frances Mezzetti – 2nd Lock
16mm-2K DCP, 19:20, colour & b/w, 2025
Shot on location in Dublin
Robert Hartpole Goes Home is an 8-channel video sculpture (19 mins) presented across 12 monitors, accompanied by a single-channel video (23 mins) installed alongside the original effigy of Robert Hartpole in Carlow County Museum.
The work responds to the legacy of 16th-century settler and sheriff Robert Hartpole, a figure associated with colonial violence and betrayal during the massacre at Mullaghmast, Co. Kildare. His decapitated tomb effigy, unearthed in 1809, becomes a point of departure for exploring themes of dislocation, historical erasure, and spectral return.
Embodying Hartpole through contemporary performer Dylan Nolan, the videos trace his imagined reappearance in a changed Irish landscape — moving through derelict estates, fragmented geographies, and lingering silences. The installation reflects on the afterlives of imperial memory, the persistence of absence, and the unstable ground between myth and history.
8-channel video (19 mins) across 12 monitors,
Single-channel video (23 mins)
Juana Robles & Michael Higgins, 2025
Commissioned by Seán Lynch
Part of the group exhibition Dreamtime Ireland and Artworks 2025 at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland, 5 June – 31 August 2025.
Alicia
Originally shot on Super 8mm film and partially blown up to 16mm for the creation of collages made up of abstract and composed photograms, the film explores the self-experimental search for artistic, gender and sexual identity of movement artist Toma Alice Péronnet.
Shot on location in Paris & Zurich
Super8/16mm-2K DCP, 00:25:27, b/w, 2024
From Steam to Screen
Expanded Cinema installation, created in collaboration with Michael Higgins as part of Welcome to the Neighbourhood international artists residency in Askeaton, Ireland. From Steam to Screen is a sensory and experiential multiple screen installation, looking at the relationship between the train and cinema while reflecting on Askeaton's abandoned train line and the short lived traveling cinema that frequented Askeaton in the 1960s.
Askeaton, 2022
Nightshades
Nightshades is a weekend trip from Jaap Pieter's bedroom and his office in the Cafe Gambrinus in Amsterdam to Katwijk aan Zee. We hear him reading out loud his love letters.
Super8-Hd, 17'38, colour, 2021
Bounty
Rue de la Lune
To be born in a family is to be possessed. The Healer, the Widow, the Lover, the Jester and the Artist represent in Rue de la Lune a female household out of space and time going through dreamlike healing processes in desperate attempts to liberate themselves from subconscious dynamics that span multiple generations.
The performance and music in Rue de la Lune was captured in improvisational performances by six artists, integrating their current or relevant art practice, localities and daily lives.
Shot on location in Torino, Kalambaka, Askeaton, Paris, Dublin & Tbilisi
Super8-2K DCP, 1:29:13, colour & b/w, 2022
Anastatica
Inspired by Joan of Castile (1479-1555) and her episode of life spent in grief and isolation, Anastatica explores mental and physical conditions under institutional concepts of control and oppression through an expressive cinematic form shot on Super 8mm film. In an improvisational performance distinguished by a strong sense of space and design, the film creates surreal worlds between life and death, dream and poetry.
Super8-2K DCP, 33'07'', colour & b/w, 2021
and a porcelain cat
Walking through the ruined streets and hoses of Belchite and Corbera d’Ebre is going back in the summer of 37 and 38, when German aviation and Franco's artillery devastated the towns. Today the old towns are a silent witness to the violence and the brutal consequences of Spanish Civil War, they are preserved as a memory of that battles and one of many wars that should never have happened.
Super8-Hd, 4'20, b/w, 2020
Catching up with a friend in The Reithalle Berne, chasing the lights and thrills of past summer nights.
Super8-Hd, 8'54'', colour, 2020
BBB
Experimental animation created by painting directly onto 16mm film. The flickering signs and textures dance to Nicole Paris beat-box You Tube battle with her mentor and father Edward Cage.
16mm-Hd, 2', b/w colour, 2019
Malvaceae
Mallow Chambers
There are eternal chambers of the unspoken where strange mallows grow.
Super8-Hd, 4'30'', b/w, 2019
Honeymoon
The objects around and inside an abandoned caravan in the remote countryside of Ireland live their careless lives after their owners time stood still.
Super8-Hd, 3' 45'' b/w, 2019
Quiet, Walnut
The boxes for the return to her home country have been packed for years. They are stacked up around her bed waiting to go. Will she ever know again, if it’s day or night, if she’s awake or asleep, if she’s breaking out or just running into a trap?
Super8-Hd, 10', b/w, 2018
Quiet, Walnut accompanies a dear friend through her emotional states during the dying process of her cancer ill mother in Belgrade.
16mm-HD, 8', color/b&w, 2018