Kira O’Reilly uses performance, video, installation and photography to consider the body as a site in which the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot.  The work is explicit, sometimes uncomfortable, and seeks to question rather than provide easy answers.  By asking the audience to take a risk, a sense of intimacy is established, creating a direct and immediate dialogue with the audience.  O’Reilly’s practice stems from a fine art background employing performance, video, installation and photography with which to consider the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations.  The materiality or fabric of the body, as well as its specificity, is also important. The relationships between bodily interior/exterior spaces are explored as a continuum.  The permeable boundaries of the skin membrane defy it as an impenetrable container of a coherent or fixed ‘self’.  The work simultaneously recognises and resists the signification of the (specifically female) body and investigates the dynamics of looking, the audience become complicit in this by undertaking their own process of confirmation and denial around what they are seeing.  This work is explicit and sometimes uncomfortable.  It seeks to question rather than provide easy answers.  By asking the audience to take a risk a sense of intimacy is established creating a direct and immediate dialogue, a contract of sorts.  Re-negotiating the relationship to audience, and recognising it as a dynamic exchange where meaning is constructed, has been central to generating works.  This distance has gradually closed bringing artist and audience into immediate and intimate dialogue, allowing the possibility to make interventions that are sometimes tender, other times troubling, always revealing.

‘I like to think Kira’s work is... not beautiful but sublime.’

Lois Keidan, National Review of Live Art Programme