My Body is an Altar reflects on lived religion, the at-once rigid but ambiguous nature of performing spiritual and cultural rites. Beginning asan audience-participatory performance, Altar’s installation uses mosaicking and sequential art techniques to invite the users to approach and read the directions clearly, while only revealing the imagery when the text is too small to perceive. Drawing on the confluence of paganism and Catholicism found in Insular Irish homes, Altar challenges the weights of Christian orthodoxy and the reconstructed nature of neo-Gaelic animism.
Altar began as an interactive performance piece, inviting participants to literally set an altar o the artists body.
The script from that performance was rewritten as a poem, which, in turn, became a nine panel comic. That comic then became a 3D pointillist sculpture made of brick building toys, symbolizing the literal reconstruction we participate in through hybridized religion.
My Body is an Altar
October 2023
Intro to the Two Minute Play, Neo-Futurarium
Interactive Performance
Setup: Five black boxes are set up on the stage, one high/two high/two high from SR to SL. A podium stands next to it. It holds unlit LED candles, a snuffer, an empty frame, and an open bottle of red wine. Two audience members are chosen and stand next to the podium. I emerge from behind doors wearing nothing, holding a semi-folded white cloth. I lay across the top of the boxes, belly-up and feet atop the lower box, and place the cloth over my shorts, beginning to unfold it.
TH: To prepare your altar:
First, unfold your cerecloth across its surface.
If the participants do not move, I will look up and repeat the instructions.
Place candles at each corner.
I wait for them to place them. If I can see they are unlit or the cloth covers my eyes, I say:
Remember to light them.
If yours is the mouth of a douter, place in it a bell snuffer.
I open my mouth. Hopefully they place the snuffer inside.
Show the face of your ancestors.
Maybe they place the frame near my face. Or theirs. Or anyone’s.
Slaughter the calves and pour from them the wine. This is the blood.
I raise my calves from the box. Hopefully the participants pour wine across my legs.
Next.
My Body is an Altar
2024
Poem
My body is an altar
The tattoos
A cerecloth
My pores secrete
Candle wax
My tongue is
A bell snuffer
Mine is the mouth
Of a douter
Veladorojos
Burning for
Seven days
I am a week man
I offer up flesh or
My spittle
For communion
Slaughtered livestock
My calves
Spill blood
The wine
Drink this and
Think of me
Frame my face
Smooth my wrinkles
Perform your
Rituals on me
My Body is an Altar, 2025
Installation
Plastic (LEGO), ink
Featured in:
A Sense of Play
Union Street Gallery
October – November 2025
