Video Links

Mutualism is a 6m30s experimental film by artists Rayleen Clancy and Beatrice O’Connell that follows a housewife who discovers a portal in her washing machine, entering a speculative ecology where human, animal and vegetal forces converge. Combining live action, stop-motion, found footage and hand-crafted props, the film playfully explores transformation, resilience and interdependence. First shown at The Courthouse Gallery and Studios, Ennistymon (2024–25), it will also be presented with Damer House Gallery, Tipperary and LOOP Festival, Barcelona (2025).

Pilgrimage of Bones' is a collaborative project by sisters Blawnin and Rayleen Clancy. It explores the Norse invasions of Ireland in the ninth century through overlooked female narratives. The work focuses on women abducted from Ireland to Iceland and forced into lives of servitude as domestics, sex workers, wives and slaves. Its title reflects their journeys, preserved in skeletal remains whose DNA has been traced by modern research. The installation connects past and present, addressing themes of cultural memory, forced migration, displacement and repatriation.

“Life is a game of chance.” In this work the Oracle Grúagach appears as an oracle, a hairy, shape-shifting figure from folklore who offers divinations of survival, luck and uncertainty. A looping video projection shows the Grúagach dealing cards, inviting the viewer to consider fate, risk and possibility.

The installation combines moving image with glowing stained glass lights and sculptural totems in ceramic and glass, transforming the space into a site of play and prophecy. The oracle suggests that resilience lies not in certainty but in embracing the unpredictable forces that shape our lives.

The Secret Cave (HD video, 8m48s, 2022) is a film by Rayleen Clancy inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Witch of Atlas. Filmed on location along the Irish coast, it transforms the discovery of a hidden littoral cave into a portal for myth, metamorphosis and visionary experience. Combining performance, mirrored imagery and layered sound, the work evokes an otherworldly realm where archetypes emerge from sea, rock and light.

The film was first screened as part of the installation 'In the Hollow Rocks' at the Custom House Gallery, Westport (2022), and South Tipperary Arts Centre - Chapel (2023), as part of the immersive installation 'Sancta Maria’s Sanctum'

Spiky Yeti Mother. A dreamlike vignette in which the Spiky Yeti Mother traverses from swamp to submarine cavern, her form splitting, merging, and reconstituting in cycles of transformation. This mutable creature enacts a choreography of continual becoming, drawing on feminist and posthuman theories of adaptive morphogenesis. Her shifting embodiment speaks to survival not through dominance, but through entanglement, permeability, and metamorphic resilience.

The Amphibious Grúagach, depicts a shape-shifting cryptid from Irish folklore, a guardian of land and sea, performing ritualistic movements that evoke ancient animistic traditions. Part spectral, part corporeal, The Grúagach embodies the blurred lines between myth, ecology, and the supernatural

The Woodland Yeti consumes the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom, enacting a ritual of ecological entanglement.

The ceramic forms function as thresholds between land and sea, human and nonhuman. The glowing openings become portals into another world, where basking sharks move in an endless rhythm of survival and adaptation. By placing the forms on the shoreline, the work stages a meeting point between the sculptural and the oceanic, suggesting that life is not separate but entangled across species and elements. The piece draws on animist thinking, where animals, objects, and environments share vitality, presence, and agency. It evokes both fragility and resilience, pointing to the interdependence that underpins survival in changing ecologies.