IN RITUAL – Anointing

IN RITUAL – Anointing is an intimate, interactive ceremonial performance centered on fire, transformation, and charcoal making. Performed by visual artist Kari Cahill, the piece invites the audience into a living installation, participating in a self-anointing ritual that offers an intimate encounter with the landscape.

Set against the Connemara landscape, IN RITUAL – Anointing rests at the threshold of ceremony, material process, and experiential art. It is neither theatre nor performance in the traditional sense, but an encounter with fire, transformation, and the ancient act of anointing.

At its heart lies the slow, reverent process of turning wild landscape into charcoal – and then into painting. Moving through the space, I will create live, embodied paintings, allowing the act itself to become the vessel of ritual. Twenty-four participants will join in groups of four, moving with me through a series of somatic encounters with the landscape – guided by incense, tinctures, and pigment.

This is the first in a national series titled IN RITUAL – where artist, fire, and landscape converge to explore thresholds of transformation through the ritualistic act of painting. At its core, the work explores the spiritual and material dimensions of charcoal-making as a ceremonial act. IN RITUAL is developed and produced in collaboration with Depth Curator Lindsay Merlihan, evolving through the formulation of contemporary ritual structures created for collective experience.

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Each ceremony lasts 25 minutes and is booked in 30-minute slots for groups of four.

Book your time from 6:30pm onwards.

Please arrive 15 minutes early as the site is a walk away from the parking.

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KARI CAHILL

Kari Cahill is a visual artist, curator, and producer working in the field of expanded painting. Her concepts emerge through an ongoing dialogue with the living landscapes she inhabits. Her studio practice includes painting, printmaking, installation, and pigment-making, with a focus on sustainable, experimental processes that involve labour, collaboration, and community. Her most recent work explores the transformative potential of fire through embodied painting, votive object-making, and ceremonial performance. She has received multiple Arts Council awards, exhibited widely in Ireland and internationally, and undertaken residencies in India, Brazil and Australia.

LINDSAY MERLIHAN

Lindsay Merlihan is a Depth Curator, producer and interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of contemporary arts and depth psychology, supporting artists to realise new bodies of work through her Arts-Based Research (ABR) method, Invocational Acts for Artistic Research. Her method uses techniques of Carl Jung’s Active Imagination to invoke the language of psyche into studio practice through ritual acts. Her creative production roles include Director of 126 Artist-Run Gallery (2021–23), co-founder of ALLTAR (2021–present), and founding member of Irish Artists for Palestine (2023–present). She has curated exhibitions at Galway International Arts Festival, Artlink Fort Dunree, and directed programmes for Body & Soul Festival. As a Depth Curator she collaborates with artists investigating psyche through material practice, and performance groups like HUARTAN (NI Music Prize Live Act of the Year 2024) and Pagan Rave (seen on RTÉ and festivals nationwide), developing characters, costumes and mythic narratives for live performance.