Walking in the Way at the South Tipperary Arts Centre in Clonmel

Walking in the Way, a series of performances by Pauline Cummins and Frances Mezzetti that began in 2009, and where the artists appear as men navigating a variety of urban locations, will be presented at the South Tipperary Arts Centre in Nelson Street, Clonmel from April 8-May 14.

The series represents a decade-long collaboration between the artists.

It is a timely showcase of contemporary thinking on gender issues and challenges the perceptions of what is culturally viewed as normal public realm negotiations from a gendered stance. Women throughout their lives experience vulnerability in public space and have a sense of not belonging, with the implication of impropriety or deviant sexuality for walking alone on a street – a fact once again brought to the fore with recent tragic events.

What began over a decade ago as a project that informed the artists’ themselves about the different ways in which men and women occupy space has grown into an exploration of different cultural assumptions about the right of ownership of the spaces of our daily lives, whether in Northern or Southern Ireland, England, Scotland, Spain or Turkey.

The show will also include a workshop run by the artists in association with Bealtaine and will see the launch of a new publication, Walking in the Way: Performing Masculinity, edited by Catherine Marshal and including essays by Dr Áine Phillips, Dr Kate Antosik Parsons and Nieves Correa.

“I understand Walking in the Way as activist performance art, a form of politics enacted in public to a broad audience, aiming to confront and change social attitudes. It is a work of queer politics in that cross-dressing and gender parodies are used by the artists to transgress and rebel against existing sexual categories” - Dr Áine Phillips, from Walking in the Way: Performing Masculinity, 2022.

This exhibition will tour later in the year to The Lab in Dublin and Wexford Arts Centre.

For more information see https://www.southtippartscentre.ie/

Very generous response to Clonmel's Mayoral Ukraine Relief Fund

Mayor thanks all who have organised fundraisers or made donations to the fund