'Holding Water' is a video work made as the outcome of a live performance by artist Paula Fitzsimons in May 2025. It is a performance action taken at Malin Head, the southernmost tip off the Island of Ireland looking out to the North Atlantic Ocean. In this singular action the artist seeks to challenge our relationship to sustainability of living natural resources that are particularly resonant to Island living and contemporary culture. To put into question humanities behaviours that are unsettling the earth’s ecological balances. The melting of the arctic icecaps and the depletion of the oceans by farming for rare-earth minerals used in the development of advanced technologies. In her performance works Fitzsimons references art historical imaging and here in particular evokes the image of 'the Pieta' as a sorrowful reflection imbued in the image of cultural traditions of an earth mother.
Paula Fitzsimons is an Irish artist working with contemporary visual arts discourse and performance art practice. As a visual artist she utilizes modes of photography, performance art, video, text/spoken word and expanded drawing technique. Her artwork conveys an interest in issues of the politics of sexual identity, the body in the physical landscape, a poetry of loss and the use of actions as carriers for meaning, making images and poetic interventions in direct response to aspects of cultural heritage, with particular emphasis on women’s experiences. She investigates questions of identity, society and political histories that excavate a spectrum of thought from poetics to philosophy. Fitzsimons has exhibited her photography and made live performance works in Ireland, Britain, France, Poland, Sweden and Italy. She has also shown photographic and moving image installations of her work in Japan, South Korea and Dubai.
Paula Fitzsimons was involved in research as a part of a vibrant, international community of artists at the Royal College of Art (School of Arts and Humanities) London from 2014 – 2023. In 2016, she was awarded distinction in her MA Painting (Performance Pathway). Continuing to develop her professional art profile she was awarded a practice-based PhD at RCA in June 2023 for a project that encapsulates Irish Outdoor Handball Alleys, a Voice of Women in Irish Culture and in the writing of James Joyce, through a contemporary reading of philosophy of Encounter. Her research involved producing an extensive body of performance works live in the landscape, photographic work and poetic text that together articulate projects focusing on considerations of how future generations look to inhabit the world we live in.
