Project Description

Synaptic Space is a performance art duo comprising of the artist Olivia Hassett and myself, Rachel Macmanus.

Together we are exploring ideas around energy, ageing, the female mid life body.

We started by making some images together early this year in Milford House, Live Art Ireland, September 2024. Below is a series of screenshots taken from the video we took, focusing on the in between screens where our images merged.

Our second meeting as a duo took us to Massey Woods, south Dublin.

The piece below, titled You you, is about call and response actions and working in sync with each other. We wanted to experiment with boundaries and consider the notion of charged spaces and pared back physical actions.

The second piece is below: Trunking.

Carrying. Load bearing. Shifting. Travelling. Effort. Ceremony. And the shapes that the movement makes within the frame.

Above video pieces created and edited by Olivia Hassett.

In our third meeting we created a series of images to camera, focusing on mirroring and energy exchange.

Our most recent body of work commenced with a callout in late 2024 from our social media accounts, using the below image and asking people to respond to the following text:

Synaptic Space are ageing. We are asking for you to send us your thoughts on how ageing is affecting you. How you are noticing it colour your lived experience. How you feel physically, how you feel mentally. The advantages, the disadvantages. The good and the bad. We want to hear from you, regardless of your age. After all, we are all ageing.
Synaptic Space will develop a new body of work exploring the collective responses we receive about your feelings and observations around ageing.

We are currently developing a body of work around the rich series of responses we received.