Our Lady Blodeuwedd, 2025
Site-specific performance
Different myths arise from different cultures; they travel and evolve through time and space. As a second-generation migrant from Sri Lanka, Anushiye Yarnell finds this land to be both home and foreign. Through her interdisciplinary performance, she reinterprets the Welsh tale Blodeuwedd – the love story of a hybrid creature, and connects fantasy and our everyday reality. Multiple locations in Wales chosen to stage this performance were carefully considered as one single theatrical site. The artist is dressed in white, wearing a flowered mask that simultaneously reveals and conceals the different aspects of the feminine archetype, a figure who seems to be hesitant or anxious, unwilling or determined, performing human dilemmas of freedom and demarcation, desire and temperance, innocence and sensuality. In addition to the bodily movements, the female voice in the background, reading the poetic verses adds an indispensable dimension of the visual narrative. These artistic reflections are expressed through her dreamlike approach, and delivered in an intimate manner. Rooted in the Welsh context, Yarnell revisits the notions of romance, love and morality through the interaction between body and site, exploring something sorrowful yet precious, illusory yet truthful, and local yet internationally recognisable.
Creative Process of Artist Anushiye Yarnell
Participating artist elaborates their creative concepts and processes.
Performance Art Land 2025 Artist
Anushiye Yarnell
Anushiye Yarnell is an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work spans movement, sound, voice, text, drawing, participation & alternative pedagogies. Her work culminates, celebrates, congregates through symbiotic, anti segregative ways of being, examining the intersections of dream and fantasy realms with ordinary life to find connections between day-to-day experiences of the world and anthropological, philosophical, poetic, and artistic frameworks. She works with tactile presence, reviving sensual intelligence through temporal, ongoing bodies-biographies-mythologies, attempting regeneration despite rifts and ruptures imposed by colonial civilisation.
Recent projects include, ARRAY OF OPPOSITES, an immersive participatory movement event drawing on embryological, evolutionary and sacred alchemical sources, commissioned for Experimentica 2024; Syllabus of Darkness, an intergenerational secular Sunday School exploring darkness as material, metaphor and lived experience (National Theatre Wales 2021, ACW 2022, Chapter 2023); and Marathon of Intimacies, a series of dance conversions navigating through the myriad intersections and combinations of “otherness” and “outsiderness" omnipresent within everyday life (Rise Festival Findhorn 2021, MGCfutures Bursary 2022, Chapter 2022 and 2023 Reciprocal Gestures Residency).