Within Me Without Me
The Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland

Within Me Without Me looks at the self in relation to others, to community, and to the natural world, focusing on the space between what we keep inside and what we share. It places the physical self in an ongoing exchange with its surroundings and with the audience, where presence is something that shifts and is constantly worked through.

Through slow, controlled actions over time, the performance explores how relationships, especially with lovers and former lovers, do not simply end. They continue to live on, carried internally while also shaping how a person moves through the world. Intimacy does not disappear, it changes form, lingering as memory, residue, and influence.

Over the course of the performance, the artist carries more than 200 large rocks up a three story castle. The repetition is both physical and symbolic, building weight, time, and memory with each movement. By the end, the stones are arranged into a shrine, marking the ongoing formation of the self shaped by experience, by relationships, and by the specific place in which it all unfolds.

Within Me Without Me understands identity as something formed in relation, not in isolation. The self becomes a place where past and present connections exist at once, continuing to shape one another over time.

Photography by Adam Winnie.