Book Chapters by Jools Gilson
Textiles Community & Controversy: The Knitting Map, 2019
This writing is a navigation of failures. The safe channels in an estuary are marked by buoys; ke... more This writing is a navigation of failures. The safe channels in an estuary are marked by buoys; keep the red buoy to port and the green to starboard, and you will travel safely. But I am compelled by the spaces outside of the publicly marked, and I wonder if it is possible to make it to harbour by other routes. Such heretic navigation promises possibility, but failure lurks under the surface. Such danger is profoundly part of the aspirant pedagogy I describe here, in which failure is itself a kind of buoy, one which tempts an exuberant buoyancy, as much as it threatens being lost at sea. So that it makes the best sense to speak of a pedagogy of failure, rather than the failure of pedagogy. This is a story about two publics; one involved in a vast collaborative knitting project, which used traditional as well as experimental gestures; the other a public who witnessed the same project through the media controversy that described it.
Textiles Community & Controversy: The Knitting Map, 2019
Dance Matters in Ireland: Contemporary Dance Performance and Practice, 2018
Attending to Movement: Somatic Perspectives on Living in this World, 2015
The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood, 2013
It's where I live, in all senses of the word. It isn't a process that's separate from everything ... more It's where I live, in all senses of the word. It isn't a process that's separate from everything I do in my life. But when I do get the chance to make focused work, then it's listening to the undertow, following the things half seen. It's writing into the heat
New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies, 2004
This article uses half/angel’s art and performance practice to analyse the ways in which digital ... more This article uses half/angel’s art and performance practice to analyse the ways in which digital technologies have altered processes of making work. It suggests that technology’s impact might be in the poetic transformation of imagination. The article focuses in particular on half/angel’s 2002 work, Spinstren.
Dancing on the Edge of Europe: Irish Choreographers in Conversation, 2003
Sometimes, as a solution to something that isn't a problem to me, I might say I am a poet, becaus... more Sometimes, as a solution to something that isn't a problem to me, I might say I am a poet, because it seems to me that I am always that. Sometimes, instead of saying I am a writer and choreographer, or an interdisciplinary artist, or an artist that works across disciplines, I might say: I am a poet. Perhaps this is an inhabited poetry, one that can't behave itself enough to keep to paper, but must instead erupt into bodies, and through the wide ache of song, or inside a dirty cupboard on a dock. My poetry won't behave itself, so that I must corrupt dancing with its voice, so that dancers say
Languages of Theatre Shaped by Women, 2003
This chapter proposes a radical connection between femininity and orality. In particular it propo... more This chapter proposes a radical connection between femininity and orality. In particular it proposes the new term 'os-text' to describe the relationship between writing and speaking one's own text in performance. The os-text incorporates the uttering mouth (the 'os'), the kissing (osculation) of words into being, and the oscillation between writing and speaking. Written, uttered, kissed and oscillatory, the os-text is a challenge to the conventional authority of the performance text. Its combination of textual and oral economies in a single corpus performs a resistance to and a revelling in both.
Conference Proceedings by Jools Gilson
CARPA6: The 6th Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts 2019, 2019
This presentation focussed on the trans-disciplinary Artistic Research project Drench, whose iter... more This presentation focussed on the trans-disciplinary Artistic Research project Drench, whose iterations include a creative radio feature and a public art installation. Writer and performer Jools Gilson and composer Sebastian Adams developed the experimental radio documentary The Rain Box in 2017 for Lyric FM in Ireland. The Rain Box was nominated for a New York Festivals World's Best Radio Award for Sound Art in 2018. Gilson and Adams are now in the process of developing a series of umbrellas, which will tell stories and enfold you in sound when the rain falls. This presentation focused on the ways in which aspects of theatre and music composition navigate disciplinary boundaries of theatre, music, broadcast radio and participatory performance to engage world-making meaning production. Our new public art project comprises a series of adapted umbrellas, which respond to precipitation / location and connect the presence, rhythm and ferocity of rainfall with tendrils of story and sound. This paper documents the sharing of a prototype of this new work and the ways in which Drench elaborates the creative, theoretical and political implications of mobilising located fluidity through embodied storytelling. Drench explores climate through the practical fact, poetic resonance, and multiple meanings of rain in Ireland; the national pleasure of rain complaint, the nuanced descriptions of rain's qualities, and the simple wonder at water pouring from the sky. Drench braids documentary footage, fairy tales, and Irish words for rain or rainy days, many of them no longer in use. This lost language of rainfall locates bodies and communities in a landscape of rain, light and wind. We're interested in the connection between linguistic and environmental gestures inflected through different disciplinary forms. By doing this, Drench aspires to rework the relationship between internal emotional worlds and environment as a way to engage in climate discourse.
12th Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium (Textiles and Settlement: From Plains Space to Cyber Space), 2010
International Dance & Technology 1999, 2000
This article brings together Helene Cixous’ theorisation of a transgressive writing practice with... more This article brings together Helene Cixous’ theorisation of a transgressive writing practice with Deleuze and Guattari’s radical re-conception of corporeality to discuss the implications, promises and failures of a digital/sonic/written/voiced choreographic practice. This piece is framed by the practice of half/angel, a performance company directed by Jools Gilson-Ellis and Richard Povall.
Border Tensions: Dance and Discourse, 1995
An analysis of the practice of two contemporary women performance artists who use written texts i... more An analysis of the practice of two contemporary women performance artists who use written texts in relation to the dancing body; Rose English and Laurie Anderson. The paper focuses on English's The Double Wedding (1991) and Anderson's Home of the Brave (1986).
Border Tensions: Dance and Discourse, 1995
A short text about the performance installation Difficult Joys.
Peer Reviewed Journals by Jools Gilson
The Cine Files: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies., 2017
Feminist Review, 2016
The received view in mainstream philosophy is that violence is an 'act', to be defined in terms o... more The received view in mainstream philosophy is that violence is an 'act', to be defined in terms of 'force' and 'intentionality'. This approach regrettably and inexcusably tends to prioritise the agent performing the act of violence in question. This paper argues that we should resist this tendency, in order to prioritise the victim or survivor of violence, and her personal experience, not that of the perpetrator. Starting from an analysis of the devastating impact of violence that characterises the experience of sexual violation and its aftermath, based on the memoirs of Susan Brison (philosopher) and Alice Sebold (novelist), we will then proceed to argue that violence should not be thought of merely in terms of an 'act', but also as an 'experience', the difference being that an act is temporally determinate while an experience is temporally indeterminate. With the help of a phenomenological approach, we will argue that violence has time-indeterminate intended and unintended consequences; these are the ripples of violence. Finally, some of the moral, legal and political implications of acknowledging the temporal indeterminacy of violence will be highlighted.
Performance Research, 2012
This writing is a navigation of failures. The safe channels in an estuary are marked by buoys; ke... more This writing is a navigation of failures. The safe channels in an estuary are marked by buoys; keep the red buoy to port and the green to starboard, and you will travel safely. But I am compelled by the spaces outside of the publicly marked, and I wonder if it is possible to make it to harbour by other routes. Such heretic navigation promises possibility, but failure lurks under the surface. Such danger is profoundly part of the aspirant pedagogy I describe here, in which failure is itself a kind of buoy, one which tempts an exuberant buoyancy, as much as it threatens being lost at sea. So that it makes the best sense to speak of a pedagogy of failure, rather than the failure of pedagogy.
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, 2007
This article analyses The Knitting Map, a large-scale, durational textile installation by the per... more This article analyses The Knitting Map, a large-scale, durational textile installation by the performance production company half/angel. It examines the ways in which technology was used in The Knitting Map to connect the weather and the levels of busyness in Cork City (Ireland) to a community of knitters, and a year-long process of hand-knitting. The article focuses on processes of translation as a fundamental operation within this ambitious work; translation of digital data into knitting patterns, as well as technology into something familiar to a community of knitters. The article suggests that by contextualising The Knitting Map’s digital technology, the processes and language of “knitting Cork” became dialogic across generations. The Knitting Map is then framed within a broader history of radical textile projects, and community art works. The article closes with an analysis of a year-long series of knitting performances by Jools Gilson-Ellis, staged in public sites in Cork City and used as a performative strategy of engaging participants both actually and symbolically in the project.
Digital Creativity: A Reader, 2002
This article suggests that the use of femininity and voice in digital art practice has a powerful... more This article suggests that the use of femininity and voice in digital art practice has a powerful potential to conjure provocative spaces in the new technoculture. Using a range of theoretical writers including Margaret Morse, Nell Tenhaaf , Simon Penny, Brenda Laurel and Sue-Ellen Case, the article traces contemporary thought on femininity, technology and voice. Gilson-Ellis uses her own choreographic / poetic practice as examples in these discussions. Through an adaptation of Sue-Ellen Case's proposal of the voudou vever and the loa, the article suggests that the voice in relation to writing and new technologies has a radical potential to open up alternative kinds of spaces in digital art practice.
The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1998
This paper is located at the collisions of femininities, technologies and performance, and in the... more This paper is located at the collisions of femininities, technologies and performance, and in the CD-ROM format in particular. The paper begins by asking what it means to be located as Other to an insurgent technology, and develops this analysis in relation to the association of femininity with un-bound flow. It goes on to call for the marking of technology with the feminine. The latter part of the paper analyses specific examples of performative practice on CD-ROM. These are Gilson- Ellis/Povall’s mouthplace, Adriene Jenik’s Mauve Desert and Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel.
Using computers to store recipes is on of the oldest jokes in the personal computer business – in the early days, that’s what all marketing executives thought women would do with them. The obvious drawback is that cookie dough, pasta sauce, and other goo-based substances will get all over the keys when you try to retrieve a recipe file. A speech interface is the obvious solution, but it would seem that the marketing executives haven’t thought of that one yet.
Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre. (1993) footnote p.174
I want to suggest in this piece that the matrix of meanings which emerge from Laurel’s footnote continue to underpin women’s relationship to technology, and to the personal computer in particular. The women Laurel describes as looming up to their PCs dripping with sauces and cookie dough is not a wholly laughable image. Women’s bodies are always constituted (literally and figuratively) as messy: they leak liquid, cry too much, gorge infants with milk. How could it be possible for such a grotesque notion of the feminine to seriously engage with new technology? And what is it about CD-ROM as a format that has relevance for a performative feminist politics?
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Book Chapters by Jools Gilson
Conference Proceedings by Jools Gilson
Peer Reviewed Journals by Jools Gilson
Using computers to store recipes is on of the oldest jokes in the personal computer business – in the early days, that’s what all marketing executives thought women would do with them. The obvious drawback is that cookie dough, pasta sauce, and other goo-based substances will get all over the keys when you try to retrieve a recipe file. A speech interface is the obvious solution, but it would seem that the marketing executives haven’t thought of that one yet.
Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre. (1993) footnote p.174
I want to suggest in this piece that the matrix of meanings which emerge from Laurel’s footnote continue to underpin women’s relationship to technology, and to the personal computer in particular. The women Laurel describes as looming up to their PCs dripping with sauces and cookie dough is not a wholly laughable image. Women’s bodies are always constituted (literally and figuratively) as messy: they leak liquid, cry too much, gorge infants with milk. How could it be possible for such a grotesque notion of the feminine to seriously engage with new technology? And what is it about CD-ROM as a format that has relevance for a performative feminist politics?
Using computers to store recipes is on of the oldest jokes in the personal computer business – in the early days, that’s what all marketing executives thought women would do with them. The obvious drawback is that cookie dough, pasta sauce, and other goo-based substances will get all over the keys when you try to retrieve a recipe file. A speech interface is the obvious solution, but it would seem that the marketing executives haven’t thought of that one yet.
Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre. (1993) footnote p.174
I want to suggest in this piece that the matrix of meanings which emerge from Laurel’s footnote continue to underpin women’s relationship to technology, and to the personal computer in particular. The women Laurel describes as looming up to their PCs dripping with sauces and cookie dough is not a wholly laughable image. Women’s bodies are always constituted (literally and figuratively) as messy: they leak liquid, cry too much, gorge infants with milk. How could it be possible for such a grotesque notion of the feminine to seriously engage with new technology? And what is it about CD-ROM as a format that has relevance for a performative feminist politics?