Driftwood Man, A Story by Dee Mulrooney | S3 Ep7

KnotWork Storytelling

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Our Story

“Driftwood Man” is a timeless tale of longing and belonging, existential homesickness and ultimately coming home that is both deeply Irish and unmistakably global. This original story emerged as artist-performer-activist Dee Mulrooney emigrated from Dublin to Berlin and speaks of the longing for home, land, and belonging.

Our Guest

Dee Mulrooney is a multi-disciplinary Irish artist. Inhabiting a female body, and all that itentails, is the main preoccupation of her work. She explores exile, class, displacement, social history, longing and belonging through various media, including painting, drawing, film, storytelling, and performance.

She is driven by story and symbolism, how we remember and interpret history and women ́s role and their bodies within that.

Dee has exhibited and performed dozens of times in Ireland, England and Berlin. Projects and collaborations include, Bridget ́s Flamin show 2023, HerStory Illuminations 2023, sell out shows at the Dublin Fringe and Cairde Sligo Arts Festival 2022, Burning Woman Festival 2022, Healing Bridges Festival 2022, “Stay with me” Tuam babies exhibition 2021, and many independent shows in Ireland and Berlin. In 2019, she co-formed the feminist “ Holy Cvnt Collective.”

Find Dee at deirdre-mulrooney.com, on Instagram, Tiktok, and FB

Our Conversation

• Exile and emigration: Dee wrote this story as she and her family were moving from Dublin to Berlin. She is an artist who presents the visceral, fragile nature of the body, who began creating when it became necessary to leave her beloved country to find safe, affordable housing for her family
• What it is like to walk the earth as a woman always homesick for Ireland. What calls the Irish diaspora and those with a soul connection to that land, and how it is to hold that when you might live on distant, colonized lands.
• Creativity as medicine
• Our cultural obsession with perfect health, perfect success, which is so different from the ancestors. What if we rejected anti-aging and embraced “Auntie Aging”?
• Dee’s identity as an artist and as a person with a working class background and how she “makes art in the cracks of the day”
• The inception and experience of being Growler, the 82 year-old cigarette smoking, cocktail drinking vagina with a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold who is wise as witches, from an area of inner-city Dublin called the Liberties.
• A celebration of the feminine and women, but also of men and the masculine, and the non-binary times we’re living in, too.
• Dee’s collaboration with an Irish publication, The Wild Word, which calls in the stories of marginalized voices: ​​and artist Eva Garland.
• The inspiration for Driftwood Man came from a puppet made by Christian Wingrove-Rogers. Watch the short animation-art film of the story.

Work with Marisa

Marisa offers 1:1 coaching for writers & creative entrepreneurs, as well as 1:1 intuitive tarot sessions called Healing for Heroines sessions.

Find more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot www.marisagoudy.com

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