paula_fitzsimons
ArtEvol 2025 / Paula Fitzsimons
Holding Water , 2025 Live performance to camera 6 min 40 sec
Paula Fitzsimons is an Irish artist whose practice engages with contemporary visual art discourse and performance. Fitzsimons works across photography, video, text, spoken word, expanded drawing and live performance, addressing the politics of sexual identity, the body in the landscape, the poetics of loss and the role of action as a carrier of meaning. Interventions respond directly to cultural heritage with particular focus on women’s experiences, investigating identity, society and political histories from poetics to philosophy. Exhibitions include performances and photography in Ireland, Britain, France, Poland, Sweden and Italy, with moving-image installations in Japan, South Korea and Dubai. From 2014 to 2023, Fitzsimons was part of the Royal College of Art School of Arts and Humanities community, completing an MA in Painting with distinction in 2016 and a practice-based PhD in 2023. Research encompassed Irish outdoor handball alleys, women’s voices in Irish culture and the writings of James Joyce, articulated through performance, photography and poetic text to reflect on how future generations may inhabit the world.
Artwork Introduction Holding Water is a video work resulting from a live performance by Paula Fitzsimons in May 2025. The performance took place at Malin Head, the northernmost point of Ireland, overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean. The work challenges humanity’s relationship to the sustainability of natural resources, particularly resonant with island life and contemporary culture. It questions human behaviours that unsettle the Earth’s ecological balance, including the melting of Arctic ice caps and ocean depletion caused by the mining of rare-earth minerals for advanced technologies. In the performance, Fitzsimons references art-historical imagery, particularly evoking the Pietà as a sorrowful reflection within the cultural traditions of the Earth Mother.
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