15 - 28 January
Upper Gallery
Dark Dark Mouth is a body of performance, drawing, and installation work by Dominic Thorpe, which addresses perpetrator trauma and the Irish Civil War (1922-23) in Cork.
Perpetrator trauma is an often under-explored aspect of conflict. It can be experienced by individuals and groups struggling to comprehend and process violence for which they have been directly or indirectly responsible.
Thorpe takes various instances of Irish Civil War killings in Cork City as his starting point. Dark Dark Mouth gives expression to the perpetrator trauma that can mark and seep into individual, collective, and generational experiences in the aftermath of violence. His installation speculates if perpetrator trauma could have surfaced within the work of students attending Crawford Municipal School of Art – then located in this building – during and after the Civil War period.
This exhibition is accompanied by a performance and symposium:
Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who works through performance art, video, photography, drawing, installation, collaborative and relational based processes. Much of his work addresses contemporary and historical violence, human rights, and institutional abuses. In recent years, his focus has expanded to include an exploration of individual and collective perpetrator trauma and, in 2022, he received a PhD at Ulster University for research on Performance Art from Ireland and Perpetrator Trauma.
This is one of six project awards commissioned as part of BUILDING AS WITNESS and supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012 - 2023.
Dominic Thorpe Research, 2023 © the artist
