Upstream, 2025-ongoing

Essay-performance - video, pissing sounds, text.

Commissioned by Mirror Lamp Press, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2025)

Upstream is an essay-performance that interweaves domestic plumbing failures, bodily illness, protest and wastewater infrastructure to explore containment, leakage and control. Through humour and discomfort, the performance examines how waste, illness and toxicity are managed, hidden or displaced, and how responsibility is deferred “up (or down) stream.” Foregrounding embodied knowledge and sensory experience, Upstream questions where care, agency and accountability reside within systems designed to make waste disappear.

The performance was commissioned by literary journal, Mirror Lamp Press, on the occasion of their journal issue ‘Rot’, for which I developed an essay (which then became the basis for the performance).

You can read the full essay here.

With thanks to Gwen and Eoghan at MLP for their support.

subsequently performed at:

Ripple Effects: Exeter University (2026)

Metaboliser (Julia Pond), 37 Looe Street, Plymouth (2026)

All images from performance of Upstream at Ripple Effects, University of Exeter 2026