Body Without World by Day Magee
- Audio Description
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Day Magee is a genderqueer performance and visual artist based in Dublin. Since 2011, they have performed as part of live art organisations such as Livestock and the Dublin Live Art Festival, before pursuing a BA in Sculpture & Combined Media in Limerick School of Art & Design in 2017. Their work concerns the subjectivity of a queer sick body: queerness navigated via fundamentalist Christianity; sickness as manifest in chronic pain; and the body being the site of self-conception and the instrument of self-reproduction. Experience acts as the dynamo, and the ensuing emotional interiority is the well from which they draw, resulting in performance-centred/performance-initiated multimedia, performing images of a self-mythology.
In their performing image work 'Body Without World', Day Magee appropriates the fairytale of The Princess and the Pea as a tale of neurosensitivity and chronic pain, reflecting on personal histories.
Image caption: Still from Body Without World by Day Magee, 2021
Image description: In the middle of a black screen a naked adult sits facing us in easy pose. Hands rest on their knees, palms upwards. Eyes closed their face appears peaceful. Surrounding their right eye is a spiral, many spirals ripple outwards from this point. Repeated, reaching upwards to rest on their head and downwards in circles touching their hands and feet. It appears as if the image is fluid, like a reflection of someone in a dark pool of water or a body floating in space. A spiral rests about their head like a halo, or a portal. A series of seven graphics of small pale figures stacked above one another overlay the spinal position. At first glance they appear to be vertebrae, on closer inspection they are people texturised to resemble bones. They take on yoga floor exercises such as corpse pose, bridge, and butterfly pose.