The Dowager Marchylove
The Dowager Marchylove erupted full-grown from the forehead of Archbishop Jack Fox in 1997, blossoming into the world like a gleaming ivory flower and bringing with her a bad, bad love for all the dirty sounds. She got her start taking naughty pictures and has since progressed to naughty sounds. One of the most successful alter egos used by the multimedia performance artist Niall Quinlan, the Dowager opens up paradoxes of liminality and identity at the same time as she transgresses boundaries of time and space. Niall Quinlan was born in 1978 and graduated from Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in 2000, with a degree in Visual Arts Practice. He began his career as an artist working in photography and performance art, most notably with transgressive radical lesbian artist Jilly Gee in the duo DUL AMACH, where the Dowager Marchylove first made her appearance known. Quinlan continues to explore image, identity and performance through a variety of “personalities” to this day.
The most important aspect of the Dowager’s recent text work is her sound poetry, composed in response to specific walks in South Dublin. As the quintessential flâneur Baudelaire immortalised a brief encounter with a woman in the streets of Paris in À une passante, so do the Dowager’s sound poems strive to seize and glorify the sounds she hears on her peregrinations. The Dowager’s practice differs from that of the nineteenth-century flâneur, however. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes of the decline of the arcade and with it of flânerie, of how “the department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.” For the Dowager, on the contrary, this is the beginning—her promenade extends throughout the streets of Dublin, through shopping centres to bus-stops and in and out of housing estates. In her 2008 suite The Wasistas of Thereswhere, That Blows in all the Vallums and Let’s all Wake Brickfaced, we see the Dowager treading a path through Tallaght to the Hellfire Club, walking north along the path of eskers, traversing Clondalkin to the Twelfth Lock of the Grand Canal; moving, being, listening, present in the moment and echoing that moment back in a continuously shifting blend of sound, text and image.
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The Dowager Marchylove is a proud member of the international arts collective Grúpat
Stream "The Wasistas of Thereswhere" by The Dowager Marchylove
The most important aspect of drag queen The Dowager Marchylove’s recent text work is her sound poetry, composed in response to specific sound walks in Dublin. As the quintessential flâneur Baudelaire immortalised a brief encounter with a woman in the streets of Paris in À une passante, so do the Dowager’s sound poems strive to seize and glorify the sounds she hears on her peregrinations. The Dowager’s practice differs from that of the nineteenth-century flâneur, however. In The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin writes of the decline of the arcade and with it of flânerie, of how “the department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.” For the Dowager, on the contrary, this is the beginning—her promenade extends throughout the streets of Dublin, through shopping centres to bus-stops and in and out of housing estates. In her suite The Wasistas of Thereswhere, That Blows in all the Vallums and Let’s all Wake Brickfaced, we see the Dowager treading a path through Tallaght to the Hellfire Club, walking north along the path of eskers, traversing Clondalkin to the Twelfth Lock of the Grand Canal; moving, being, listening, present in the moment and echoing that moment back in a continuously shifting blend of sound, text and image.
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (Irish Times) and “wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Walshe has written a large number of operas and theatrical works, including XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! an opera for Barbie dolls, and TIME TIME TIME, with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which the Wire described as “a sprawling opus that spans the history of the planet… like Robert Ashley meets Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life”. Her visual work has been exhibited in the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, Project Arts Centre, Dublin and the ICA, London.