I’m what’s called a Coda – child of deaf adults – so my childhood wasn’t run of the mill, but it was gorgeous and I’m so proud of it. Mum and Dad were hugely involved in the deaf club in Rathmines so we would literally go there every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening along with all of the other deaf families in Dublin. It was glorious because once our parents walked through that door, they told us to go off and play and we ran wild.
We could also relax there because at the deaf club our parents were “normal”. I saw a tremendous difference between how they behaved at the club and in the hearing world. They never came to school events or after-school activities and my mum would be very nervous meeting an important hearing person. There were a lot of ugly comments and mocking if we signed on the street. My parents wouldn’t have been aware of it and I never told them, but I suppose I carried that a little. My younger brother and sister and I didn’t really sign in public when we were young. We knew it wasn’t acceptable and we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves, but if we had to, we would turn our bodies sideways and hold our hands low, as if it was a secret.
People used to tell me I was very good for looking after my mum and dad, but I thought, am I looking after them? At the deaf club, everybody spoke in Irish Sign Language and all of our roles were proper: parents were parents and children were children. All of the families there were exactly the same and I remember the sense of relief that came with it.
At school in St Anne’s in Milltown, I was known as the kid with deaf parents. I remember being brought to the top of the class so that I could teach everybody how to sign. They kind of celebrated it and I was seen as special. In some ways that was very important to me.
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At the same time, there was a lot of anxiety that a firstborn Coda wouldn’t be able to speak correctly because his or her parents were deaf. The thinking was that we should be sent to elocution lessons so we’d be able to teach our younger siblings how to speak properly. I was sent to drama classes instead and I absolutely loved it. I was in every play and I entered every competition and Feis Ceoil going. My parents never came there and they never saw anything I did and I preferred it that way. This was my world.
I’ve been living in Belfast for 10 years. When we left Dublin in 2014, Ireland was just coming out of the recession, and it was a very expensive place to be a freelance artist. My husband [Jimmy Fay] got his dream job [executive producer of The Lyric] and we thought it’d be for a couple of years, but here we are with a son about to do his GCSEs.
Belfast is a great, great city to be an artist. There’s loads of artists’ studios because it’s affordable; I pay the same rent here as I did in Dublin in 1992. It makes life much more comfortable. You can actually focus on the work rather than rushing around having to do money jobs. There was a survey done a couple of years ago that said the average artist in Ireland earns €10,000-€15,000 a year.
[ A high-risk performance from Amanda CooganOpens in new window ]
I row on the river Lagan every week. Post-Covid, a gang of wonderful menopausal women got together to start rowing. I love being out on the water. There’s herons and kingfishers; all of that wildlife is magnificent. My work involves a lot of managing and persuading people so I love just sitting in a boat, switching all that off and being told what to do. The cox is God so when she tells you to do something, you do it. Then, as the boys in Skibbereen would say, you pull like a dog.
It’s unquantifiable how much culture and environment seep into an artist’s work. I would definitely say my work is of Ireland. I’m just home from the Bangkok Biennale where I performed Freude! Freude!, which is a kind of transcription into sign language of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The costumes were too heavy to deal with the Bangkok heat and there was no sign in Thai for the word “rose”. I noticed several tiny nuances that revealed how “of Ireland” my work is.
I don’t think Irish people get performance art. It’s avant-garde so it can be scary and a little out there. But I absolutely believe that if someone experiences it, they’ll think: Ah, okay! Irish people love to tell a story. Performance art doesn’t dictate the story, instead it offers possibilities. In performance art, you’re looking at another human being, making an activity that in some way explores a story, and that story can be as individual as each audience member. I’m not dictatorial about what my work means.
We also love live events in Ireland: the puck of a hurl, the kick of a ball, horses racing. We love the unpredictable possibilities and we are such super optimists. That feeds into performance art, especially durational work like mine. The audience wonders: Is she going to be able to complete this? How is she going to do it? It throws another human being in front of you and a kind of empathy comes into play. Give it a chance; come and watch it.
In conversation with Marie Kelly. This interview, part of a series, was edited for clarity and length. Coogan’s film Gnawing on the bones – Reflections on Beuys (2022) is currently being shown as part of the Beuys 50 Years exhibition at the Ulster Museum. She is also taking part in In Pieces: Navigating the Body in Contemporary Irish Art at The Glucksman in Cork.