Dr Naomi Sex is a Dublin-based visual artist. She has been practicing for over fifteen years and has exhibited on an on-going basis both nationally and internationally. Her work has received numerous awards, residencies and state commissions. She has lectured for many years in the Fine Art Department at The Dublin Institute of Technology and is a director on the Board of The Visual Artists of Ireland.

In 2012, she completed a practice-based PhD. Based on an extensive period of research she developed a new strand of practice and now uses performance to produce understated theatrical gallery-based situations to articulate her ideas. She works with actors and scripted material to produce these works. In 2013 she produced a per formative event entitled, The Synchronised Lecture Series. The performance featured in nine key Irish educational institutions simultaneously. In each location a different actor performed to scripted dialogue, actions and a minimal use of prop enacting a complex, composite staged piece. This unprecedented event was awarded The Irish Arts Council of Ireland’s “Visual Art Project Award, 2013″ and The Dublin City Council “Incubation Space Award”.

In 2014 she was selected for The Artist in Residency Program at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) where her she produced several new projects. This included curating the 6iX DEGREES event and scripting a major new performance entitled Cheek By Jowl. This new performance was recently awarded ‘The Touring Visual Arts Award, 2016’ by The Artscouncil of Ireland. Cheek By Jowl will be performed and tour throughout 2016 in conjunction with state portrait collections at The Model Sligo, Limerick City Gallery, Crawford Art Gallery and IMMA. In 2017, she will have a solo exhibition encompassing all of her recent performance works at The Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA).

Title Practice makes practice . . . visible? Revealing structures of the artistic field by articulating the evasive properties inherent in its systems of production through art practice

Abstract This practice-led research project attempts to seek out and reveal the structures that frame the production of art practice, through and with art practice itself. With this premise in mind, the first phase of the study aims to use practice-led research by adopting quasi-ethnographic strategies firstly to explore the field of artistic production, and secondly in an attempt to activate, capture and contain tangible evidence that the artistic field is powered by persuasive informal discourse and practices that contribute to stringent and hierarchical rules of engagement. Entering the second phase of the project the contribution of this study is based on the proposition that as a research project it utilises the performative lecture to position art practice as a formal presentation model demonstrating that art practice in and of itself can act as an appropriate tool to articulate the findings from the practice-led research cited above. The study aims to demonstrate that art practice can be an adept conceptual, contextual mode of communicating its own particular character, to iterate and embody its own hierarchical structures and articulate, critically, by rendering visible its structures and evasive, invisible properties.

Through a decisive performative approach adopted in the second phase of the project, the artworks produced seek to tease out and form a type of rebuttal towards the problem of subjectivity inherent in my position as a researcher in relation to my research enquiry, that is, the problem of how an artist can make critical artworks about the system of which he/she is a part. This teasing out process is done by attempting to attain an insightful ‘inter-subjective’ reflexivity around my research enquiry through performative practice and by adopting self-conscious strategies. These self-conscious attributes aim to acknowledge, harness and present nuances of subjectivity, coupled with and couched in a formal academic context where the performative works play out, acting as an objective frame for the work.

Through a body of practice contained on the accompanying website (naomi-sex.com) and text including various theoretical references where at conceptually relevant points art practice theory and textual content intersect and interface, this project as a whole aims to present and contextualise the subject of my enquiry, its influencing factors and the outcomes of the research period.

Link http://www.naomi-sex.com
The Synchronized Lecture Series Array