Extracts of the HERE & NOW
Veronica Dyas (IE)
Installation, 2014
Extracts of the HERE & NOW consists of two installed theatre pieces condensing the concepts of HERE & NOW, a creative research project the artist began in 2012 exploring how we live now, through the lens of housing, homelessness, spirituality and the practice of walking.
Vacant is a Grandmother’s Chair. There may be some secrets down the side of the cushion. She won’t sit there again but visitors can, whilst listening to words of LOVE and reflecting on the Irish housing crisis. Visitors can ponder the vacancies left where once there were homes.
What’s Left invites visitors to take a place inside a blue nylon sleeping bag, to see from another perspective while listening to the sound of walking west along the Camino de Santiago. Read the redacted diary of this life changing journey, or rummage through the rucksack of what used to be held close. This is all that remains post-Project Downsize, a project where the artist shed most of her possessions. There are labels signifying what she gifted, a living will with letters signed ‘Wishing you LOVE & ABUNDANCE & JOY,’ indicating there is enough for everyone, without waste.
These works are an action of potential, while contemplating how to get out from under negative equity and mortgage arrears on returning home from walking the Camino, by asking ‘what do I really need to live HERE & NOW?’
About the artist:
Veronica Dyas studied Drama and Theatre Studies with Sociology at Trinity College Dublin and completed an M.A. in Text and Performance Studies at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and King’s College London. Returning to Dublin she focused on installed theatre including two pieces for Dublin Fringe Festival; YOU (2009), a series of installations in private and public spaces around the city and In My Bed (2011), an autobiographical one woman show in collaboration with Niamh Burke-Kennedy, re-staged at Forest Fringe at The Lir and HOME Festival Cork. She presented the creative research project HERE & NOW in stages as HERE & NOW, Project Arts Centre in 2014; This Is My Body, Live Collision 2014; all that signified me… THE THEATRE MACHINE TURNS YOU ON: Vol. 3, Project Arts Centre 2013; beginning at Sorcha Kenny’s Walking We Ask Questions, Dublin Fringe Festival 2012. Veronica is currently attempting to write a nonfiction novel.