Tara Baoth Mooney: Artist's breast cancer experience inspires VR project
A still from Tara Baoth Mooney's Mammary Mountain.
Tara Baoth Mooney’s experience of breast cancer was the inspiration for Mammary Mountain, a 23-minute virtual reality project that launches this week (August 28th) at the Venice Immersive, the Extended Reality section of the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
Mooney’s treatment for her condition has been successful. “But at the same time, the experience changes you completely,” she says. “It's probably going to be a good while before I die, but it's not as remote an idea as it would have been before. It's very much now in its place within the timeline of my living. My intention now is to live as well as I can for as long as I can.”
Mooney, an interdisciplinary artist from Clare who is now based in Co Sligo, performs and records as a musician with the experimental music groups Rune and Star of the Sea, and it was, she says, only natural that she would document her treatment in sound. “I recorded different aspects,” she says, “like my walking journeys to the radiotherapy centre, which happened every day for 40 days, and the sounds of the machines that were doing the actual treatments. When I went outside, I felt heightened in my awareness of sounds emanating from natural sources, as opposed to these massive Siemens machines, and I recorded them too.
“I was writing as well. Some of the stuff I wrote is completely unintelligible because when you’re being treated you're also deeply intoxicated. And I think a lot of people don't realise that; that you're actually hallucinating some of the time.” While Mooney considered what to do with her material, she approached Leitrim Arts Office for support.
“They gave me some funding just to give me a little time and space to organise it a bit. It was really just for me to process what I’d been through in the previous year and a half. There was absolutely no idea in my head of what I might make of it.”
It was only when Mooney’s friend Camille Baker came to visit that she thought about how to develop the project. “Camille is based in the Royal College in London,” says Mooney. “She’d been working on a piece called Into Her, which is based around ovarian cancer, and we talked about doing a similar project around health care, but health care for the kind of people that are a little bit on the edges. Women's health care, and the health care of people who are going through transformative experiences, is often not taken seriously.”
They agreed to collaborate, and then invited the Brighton-based digital media artist Maf’j Alvarez to participate as well. “We gathered in Sligo for a week or so,” says Mooney. “We walked the landscape I’d been walking while I was unwell, and we looked at Knocknarea Mountain, where Queen Maeve is reputed to be buried. I’d been holding these archetypes and totems very strongly in my mind while the rest of me was falling apart.
“It felt really important that whatever work we were going to make would be rooted in the land. It would not make such a distinction between the body and the land, but would weave them together, in a way, and make them symbiotic. And it would look at how disease as an idea isn't just limited by the body, that it is actually actively moving into the land, as we know, and that these things are all related.”
Although Mooney often works in textiles and drawing, her practice also includes performance and video, and she was happy to see Mammary Mountain develop as a virtual reality project. “It felt like a perfect vehicle for marrying the drawings and the writing and the music and the sound,” she says. “We could make it immersive, and once we put it in a headset, we could literally bring it anywhere. I've brought it to my father's nursing home, for example. And we've shown it as a little pop-up for teenagers. We've been able to access the types of people who would never go to a gallery. That was really important for us.”
Mooney and Alvarez worked with a VR software programme called Unity, but soon discovered its limitations. “We weren't really able to find desexualised bodies on the programme,” says Mooney. “All the bodies were overly sexualised for the gaming industry. So we had to modify different kinds of bodies and map the drawings onto these 3D forms. But that was really interesting as well.”
Mammary Mountain utilises the testimony of eight other cancer survivors along with Mooney’s material. “All those voices are so different, and that feeds into a whole ecosystem of diversity,” she says.
Mammary Mountain has already been presented in the UK, at Dundee, Paisley and Doncaster, and it will have its Irish premiere in the autumn. “We'll be showing it in an empty shop front in Carrick-on-Shannon, and then we'll do a screening and an artist's Q&A at the Dock arts centre.”
Before that, however, the project will screen at Venice from 28th August - 7th September. “It's a performative installation, so I’ll be there the whole time,” says Mooney. “We've created a small medical doctor's office, where visitors are given a questionnaire and a consent form while they wait to view it, just to give them the experience of what it's like to be in the medical environment.
“There’s also a garment that people wear that allows the piece to be experienced not just in the head, but also in the body. As certain things are happening - in the radiotherapy section, for instance - there's quite a lot of buzzing in the garment. That's an important aspect of it as well.”
Mooney insists the Mammary Mountain project is not just about cancer treatment, but also “all these more esoteric things around life and death and how they're all connected. I mean, I feel very lucky to be alive, and to be in a position where I could take the experience of cancer treatment and talk about it as an artist.”
- Mammary Mountain screens at the Venice Immersive from August 28 - September 7.
- Further information: mammary-vr.art tarabaoth.wordpress.com
