Holly Marie Parnell

Cabbage
Holly Márie Parnell
2 May 2024, 18:30 - 22:00

Join us at FormaHQ for a screening of Holly Márie Parnell's film Cabbage, followed by a Q&A with curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais and the launch of a new essay by Alice Hattrick.

An intimate work made in collaboration with the filmmaker’s family, Cabbage re-frames language and explores personal agency within an ableist paradigm. It centralises her brothers' digital and rhythmic writings using eye tracking technology, and her mother’s reflections on a life lived having to prove her son’s humanity. Moving between contrasts of lived experience and bureaucratic violence, the film is a subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued. The film documents the months preceding a move from Canada back home to Ireland - a country they had to leave a decade prior because of austerity driven cuts to disability funding.

Biography

Holly Márie Parnell is an artist filmmaker based between Glasgow and Wexford, Ireland. Working in film and expanded cinema, she is often drawn to the way power embeds and affects people and places. Taking a documentary approach, the work is built from personal encounters and is motivated by the subtle yet powerful truths of embodied knowledge and lived experience. Her practice explores ideas around connectedness and freedom - looking at the ways in which primal needs are being threatened and eroded within our current economic and institutional frameworks. Her work has been shared across the UK and abroad, with projects at Jupiter Woods, Humber Gallery, Sirius Arts Centre, and TULCA. Recent screenings include Hot Docs Toronto, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Filmhuis Cavia Amsterdam and WORM Rotterdam. Her latest film Cabbage was part of aemi’s 2023 Irish national and international tour Súitú and was nominated for the Golden Key award at Kassel Dokfest, Germany. She is an alumnus of Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship, and an MFA graduate of the Slade.