Event Details:

UCD Foundation is delighted to host an in-conversation event with poet Julie Morrissy and Dr Adam Hanna (University College Cork) to celebrate the launch of Morrissy’s artist booklet Performances in All Directions, and its accompanying performance film. The conversation will delve into Morrissy’s creative and research practice in this multi-platform, mixed-genre project. In a four-part essay, Performances in All Directions explores a range of influences from visual art, critical theory, and contemporary poetry, and their impact on Morrissy’s practice as it moves from the page into video and performance. The booklet also includes field notes written after research trips to Toronto, Canada, where the author previously lived, and the birthplace of her maternal grandmother in Ravensdale, Co. Louth. These notes connect to Morrissy’s ongoing poetry project “Certain Individual Women”, which interweaves lyric poems about her own experiences and those of her grandmother, with documentary legal poems. This new booklet includes photographs from a rich family archive, and images by the author and her collaborator Annick Counihan . The booklet (designed by Emma Conway) and corresponding performance film (created by filmmaker Alisha Doody, and filmed at UCD) showcase a significant collaborative impulse in Morrissy’s practice, uncovering new concerns and powerful connections between family legacy, personal experience, and the law.

Contributors:

Julie Morrissy is a poet, lecturer, and literary critic. She is the inaugural John Pollard Newman Fellow in Creativity at University College Dublin. Her work has been exhibited in the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, and her first collection Where, the Mile End (2019) is published by Book*hug (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (UK). She is a recipient of the MAKE Theatre Award, the Arts Council ‘Next Generation’ Award, and the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the National Library of Ireland. www.juliemorrissy.com

Adam Hanna is a Lecturer in Irish Literature in the English Department of University College Cork. He joined UCC in 2015. He has taught in the English departments of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Bristol and the University of Aberdeen, and he has also trained and practised as a solicitor. His second monograph, Poetic Justice: Poetry, Politics and the Law in Modern Ireland, is forthcoming with Syracuse University Press and he is a co-founder of the Irish Network for the Legal Humanities. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space (Palgrave, 2015), and is the co- editor (with Eugene McNulty) of Law and Literature: The Irish Case (forthcoming Liverpool University Press, 2022) and (with Jane Griffiths) of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave, 2020).

Emma Conway is a graphic designer based in Dublin. She is currently the designer at the National Library of Ireland. www.emmaconwaydesign.com

Annick Counihan is an Irish animator and technician, based in Toronto.

Alisha Doody is a visual artist and educator working with the mediums of photography and moving image. She is committed to ethical, and educational engagements with the LGBTQ+ community to understand and represent the effect of the current social and political landscape on this diverse identity and the sharing of this research with the community it involves. www.alishadoody.com