Performances > There is only Love & Longing 2002



There is only Love & Longing
Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick
October 2001

National Review of Live Art in the UK (NRLA)
The Arches, Glasgow
13th February 2002

Special Thanks to
Curators Lois Keidan & Nikki Millican (NRLA)
Helena Walsh, assistant
Sean Taylor for invaluable advice & support

A performance incorporating recorded sound, images and live action, duration 15 minutes.

From Live Art Magazine, UK guide to hybrid & live art May 2002…
“there were some real jewels in Lois Keidan’s selection (of the NRLA) …I would mention Aine Phillips who, clad in a wedding dress, and having bathed her assistant in mud and river water, read her lover’s lament from a long pink ribbon that she tugged, Schneemann-like from the beautifully embroidered vagina on the front of her knickers.”
Robert Ayers

Love is the only choice…
We are enmeshed in struggles with love and desire.
Our bodies, our lives are defined by love and generated by longing.

Images of the heart are layered with ideals of beauty, sensuality, transcendence and defilement.

After bathing my assistant Helena Walsh in mud, I raise my skirts to reveal an ‘interior text’ and read a lovers lament. I tenderly guide my friend out of the venus-like blue shell bath, wrap her in a survival blanket and exit while a series of time-lapse images showing two hearts decomposing dissolve into each other.