![Orla Mc Hardy](http://www.themodel.ie/wp-content/plugins/revslider/sr6/assets/assets/dummy.png)
I am an artist and educator, originally from Donegal. Working across disciplines, I’m interested in animation as a mode of thinking, as a way of slowing down and paying close attention to a given idea or question. I appreciate its world building potentials as well as its slippy ambiguity in relation to truth. In terms of process – the bit by bit, frame by frame, slow incremental build – is a generative model of working across all media. I see animation as a non-media specific, messy leaky container where you can bung in all these modes of working and shake it all together and it can hold it, especially when the end result looks nothing like animation as you might normally define it.
Working through expanded animation, video, text, documentary, collage, sculptural installation and within a tradition of feminism(s), my current work interrogates where value is placed (and not placed) on the hidden time of care and labour. My research-based practice reclaims embodied subjectivity and the interrupted time of caregiving as sites of critical knowledge, where our lived experiences and daily activities are forms of expertise that exist outside of institutional frameworks.
I received my BA from IADT, (Dublin, Ireland) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, (Chicago, USA). I’m currently Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Dept. of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA. Recent screenings of my work have included aemi-online (Ireland); Missing Observer Studies (USA); the Anthology Film Archives (USA); Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA); DOK Leipzig (Germany) and Kinodot Film Festival (St. Petersburg), where I won Best Film. My work has been exhibited internationally, at Kunsttempel (Kassel, Germany); Tabakalera (Contemporary Culture Centre of San Sebastian, Spain;, Zachęta National Gallery of Art and the Centre for Contemporary Art; Ujazdowski Castle (both Warsaw, Poland). Solo shows in Ireland include the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, the Regional Cultural Centre, Donegal, and The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon.