Munster in 30 Artworks, No 29: Vacuuming in a Vacuum, by Aideen Barry

The Cork artist was inspired by her high-flying cousin Breda, and travelled to a NASA facility to create her short film 

A still from Vacuuming in a Vacuum, by Aideen Barry. 

The artist Aideen Barry may not have been the first Cork woman in space, but she came pretty close in 2008 when, dressed as a vacuum cleaner, she was filmed floating in a zero gravity chamber on a NASA aircraft known as ‘the Vomit Comet’. The result is one of her most striking works, a short film called Vacuuming in a Vacuum.

The project came about after Barry, with support from the Arts Council of Ireland, was awarded an arts residency at NASA at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Much of Barry’s artistic output is concerned with ‘the domestic uncanny’, videos of the artist engaged in manically repetitive activities such as slicing bread, mowing the lawn or eating cake.

When it comes to being suspended in space, she has form; a previous film called Levitating depicts her hoovering the house while floating several inches off the ground.

“A lot of the work I was making in the late Noughties was about being trapped in the domestic world as a woman and mother,” she explains.

“To this day, Article 41.2 of the Constitution enshrines the idea that a woman’s place is ‘in the home’, and I thought it was interesting that, despite all our achievements, Irish women are still confined to the domestic space. I made Levitating over a week in 2007, jumping in the air and capturing myself in mid-air vacuuming, cutting the lawn, shopping, and putting out the bins. I had the laborious task of filming each jump twelve times to secure a single second of footage, an act of invisible labour to create a visual fiction.”

Aideen Barry.

Barry, originally from Mayfield, and a graduate in Fine Art, Sculpture from Galway Mayo Institute of Technology (now ATU), traces her interest in space to the ambitions of an older cousin who babysat her as a child. “My cousin Breda O’ Callaghan is a super smart woman, and was the first in the Barry family to go to university. She studied Physics in UCC, and went off to America to join Xontech designing weapons guidance systems for Reagan’s Star Wars programme in the 1980’s, determined to be the first Irishwoman in space.

“I think it was a family problem with our knees that ruled her out of qualifying for the final round of Astronaut training, though she was working with Nasa for years.”

When Barry conceived the idea of Vacuuming in a Vacuum, NASA was inevitably the first organisation she thought of to approach for assistance. There were the usual bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome before she was finally granted permission to film for a single day on the Vomit Comet – or the Weightless Wonder, as NASA likes to call it - at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

“I’m not sure how far up we got,” says Barry. “But it was far enough that you could see the curvature of the earth.”

Other stills from the short film, Vacuuming in a Vacuum.

Barry was accompanied by Chris Hurley of Cork Film Centre, who was cameraman on the project. “The aircraft is usually used for acclimatising astronauts to the effects of anti-gravity,” he says. “But it was also used for filming the special effects in the movie Apollo 13. The aircraft does a series of parabola. It dives, bottoms out and dives again, and as the dives get steeper, you start to levitate.

“I was lying on the floor, hanging onto a rope and trying to control the float as well as I could so I could operate the camera. That was probably the weirdest shoot I’ve ever done. But the fact that I was concentrating on filming Aideen meant I wasn’t able to fully appreciate it at the time.”

Vacuuming in a Vacuum has been shown at a number of venues, including the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, the RHA in Dublin, and the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny.

Barry has gone on to be recognised as one of Ireland’s most prestigious young artists, being elected to Aosdána in 2019 and the Royal Hibernian Academy as an ARHA member in 2020.

Membership of Aosdána has allowed her to take a sabbatical from teaching at Limerick Institute of Technology and devote more time to artmaking.

This year, her feature film Klostės (Folds/Pleats) premiered as a special European Capital of Culture commission at Kaunas 2022 in Lithuania, using stop-motion animation to explore the city’s history and myths, and just recently An Post issued her first design for a postage stamp, inspired by the legend of Balor of the Evil Eye.

• Further information: aideenbarry.com