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Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
Growler \u2013 a fictitious 78-year-old vulva from inner-city Dublin \u2013 is an activist, an abuse survivor and a feminist. It was conceived by Dee Mulrooney, the multi-disciplinary Irish artist whose work transverses mediums, reclaiming the divine feminine and reframing the savage underbelly of Ireland\u2019s religious doctrine. Mulrooney arrived in Berlin in 2016 as an economic migrant, racked with physical and emotional pain, seeking art as a way to navigate trauma. Alongside producing formidable 2-D works that reference saintly iconography and female forms, Mulrooney began writing an agony aunt column for The Wild Word as Growler. It was a happy accident, courtesy of costume designer Eva Garland, that brought Growler into the third dimension.<\/p>\n
Without any formal performance training to speak of, Mulrooney excavated her life and those of her ancestors through the creative channel of Growler to vocalise the secrets and lies that plague generations of women. Following a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and a live podcast with Irish legend Blindboy at Babylon Berlin in 2024, Mulrooney will install and perform Growler\u2019s Grotto at English Theatre Berlin for two nights in March.<\/p>\n
In Ireland, grottos can be found everywhere, momentously carved into rock faces or compiled slap-dash at the end of a road, laden with plastic flowers, euro-shop candles and various offerings thrown at the feet of Our Lady. For Growler, too, grottos are a place of wonder and worship and a reminder of the prevailing but waning legacy of Catholicism within the Emerald Isle. Part theatre performance, part portal, with a shamanic vulva at its centre, Growler\u2019s Grotto will weave together songs, spoken word and comedy. In Mulrooney\u2019s own words, \u201cThis is where we come together to transmute the shite out of ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
What was the catalyst for creating Growler?<\/p>\n
We were organising this alternative Irish Arts Festival in Berlin two years after we\u2019d landed here. It was meant to be an exhibition for my husband\u2019s work, and we\u2019d started to build a community of artists supporting each other with gigs and exhibitions, stuff like that. He said, \u201cI don\u2019t want to do it on my own. I\u2019d rather do it with more people,\u201d so it ended up becoming a festival called Craw. Craw means something that gets stuck in your throat \u2013 something that you want to say, that you should say, but you know if you say it, it\u2019s probably going to cause problems. We wanted to explore why we left Ireland, because in my experience, most artists who leave Ireland leave because they have to. It\u2019s not necessarily because they want it. It\u2019s not necessarily by choice. It\u2019s forced economic migrancy, usually, and that was certainly our reason for leaving. Also, I have several autoimmune disorders and I was trying to understand this idea. Why is my body attacking itself? You know, in order to \u2018keep itself safe\u2019? It\u2019s really bizarre. So I was kind of going from the micro to the macro and looking at the earth and looking at us, trying to understand why my body was so unwell. I was thinking of being in conversation with my uterus or vulva because\u2026 I suppose, to get to the root cause.<\/p>\n
This is where we come together to transmute the shite out of ourselves.<\/p>\n
The result is so striking. How was the costume developed?<\/p>\n
I asked my friend Eva Garland if she would make a hand puppet for me, and then I\u2019d do a ventriloquist act for the Craw festival. I\u2019d never done anything like this before, but it was more like a vehicle to just try and understand this trauma. It was about talking about why we\u2019re all here, how difficult that\u2019s been and the pain of it in an alternative way. Growler initially started out as a drawing of a wrinkly vulva smoking a cigarette with two Creole earrings piercing the labia to accompany my agony aunt column, and then the drawing was supposed to be a glove puppet. But Eva actually came back to me with the form. She found these two pieces of foam on the street. They looked like a wolf and she was like, \u201cWhy does it have to be a glove puppet? Let\u2019s make it a full-body puppet.\u201d So that\u2019s what happened. That\u2019s how Growler became what you see now.<\/p>\n
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Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
Just to clarify for those not familiar, \u2018growler\u2019 is a slang term for \u2018vagina\u2019\u2026\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeah, exactly. Like really bad \u2013 like one of the worst. It\u2019s like \u2018cunt\u2019. I don\u2019t know how you feel about using the word \u2018cunt\u2019. I\u2019m a big fan of reclaiming that word. I love it. Where I grew up in Dublin, [the word] was very specific to the north side in the suburbs. You know, the boys would say behind our backs, \u201cI wish I was your growler.\u201d You know, that\u2019s what the term was. And I just love it, because also, a growler growls.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve been very outspoken about the discovery of a mass grave on the grounds of a mother and baby home in Tuam in County Galway. How did you react to that physically and artistically?<\/p>\n
I heard the story while I was in Ireland. I was sitting beside my dad and I just remember the rage. I thought my head was going to blow off! Mother and baby homes were places where women who got pregnant outside of a marriage were sent to have their babies. But they were often incarcerated for the rest of their lives, and the poorer they were, the more likely they were to stay there for longer periods of time. There was one particular home in Tuam where the mortality rate was really, really high, and in 2017, they discovered the remains of nearly 796 babies between the ages of three weeks and three years old in a septic tank. We\u2019d always heard these stories about mother and baby homes, and my mum talked about them. Actually, my auntie was in one. But it\u2019s when you hear about babies in a septic tank \u2013 it\u2019s just unfathomable, you know? Where do you put that rage when you\u2019re a woman? So I started drawing. These homes were actual laundries where women worked all day long, run by the nuns. They were known as the Magdalene laundries, because of course, up until that point, Magdalene was seen as a fallen woman, before she was reinstated as a saint. For me, that was a powerful icon.\u00a0 That drawing came out, and the idea was to try and take the babies out of that place \u2013 just take the darkness away. And then the floodgates opened, really, and I never stopped drawing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that one generation ago \u2013 just one generation \u2013 I would have been locked up for being Growler.\u201d<\/p>\n
Did you feel this trauma and pain has been passed down through generations of women?<\/p>\n
I know that one generation ago \u2013 just one generation ago \u2013 I would have been locked up for being Growler. You know, up until the 1970s, we weren\u2019t even allowed to have your own bank account in Ireland as a woman. You weren\u2019t allowed to own property. When I started making these Virgin Mary vulva pictures and stuff with blood and pain, I was really scared. I could feel it viscerally. I could feel the, \u201cOh God, are they going to get me?\u201d I\u2019d wake up in the middle of the night because I have this nervous system that\u2019s like a canary in a mine. But where did I get that? And why do I have this innate fear of just being a woman? Why am I afraid that they\u2019re going to lock me up? Because it\u2019s there. Because that\u2019s what happened.<\/p>\n
Do you feel that the art you were creating had a cathartic or therapeutic aspect to it?<\/p>\n
It was only in hindsight that I realised what I was trying to do. I know a lot of artists say, \u201cWell, you shouldn\u2019t therapise your art,\u201d or whatever. Fuck that. You do whatever you want. I suffer from endometritis. I\u2019d had three operations and an IUD inserted and nothing worked. I kept bleeding, so I was due to have a hysterectomy in 2018, and I was pretty devastated because I didn\u2019t want to go into menopause so young, and I didn\u2019t feel like it was my story. So then I worked really, really hard \u2013 with the art as well, actually \u2013 and I made a lot of pieces about that. And then somehow, it just stopped. The bleeding stopped. I bled non-stop for six months between the Craw festival on the June solstice until the end of November 2018, and then it stopped. And that was it then. I think art and the birth of Growler had a lot to do with that.<\/p>\n
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Makar Artemev<\/p>\n
With Growler, do you feel a sense of responsibility when discussing these topics?<\/p>\n
I think I naturally have a sense of trying to be sensitive \u2013 I think I do \u2013 just in terms of my own interpersonal relationships. Growler is no different. I don\u2019t want to hurt anybody, and I don\u2019t want to put salt on a wound, but I also feel that it\u2019s well within my own personal story to be able to talk about these things, not just because of my own family, but also because I\u2019m an Irish woman. And we have to keep talking about it, because it fades so quickly. It fades when people die, and most of the women who gave birth in these homes and had their babies taken \u2013 most of them have nearly gone. People might say, \u201cWhy do we need to keep going back over the past?\u201d Well, we need to keep going back over the past so that we don\u2019t do it again. If we don\u2019t heal from that trauma, I think we\u2019re doomed to repeat the same mistakes. And for me, it\u2019s like, heal the past to heal the future. I\u2019m amazed that I\u2019ve been doing Growler for six years, and I could count the amount of negative comments I\u2019ve had on one hand. And they were ridiculous. One of them was like, \u201cShe looks like a curtain!\u201d You know, that\u2019s as deep as it went.<\/p>\n
Did a man say that?<\/p>\n
Of course. I\u2019m very clear about what it is that I\u2019m doing, and that really is to tell women\u2019s stories, and they\u2019re not lies. They\u2019re just relaying stories. They\u2019re relaying intergenerational folklore as well. And that\u2019s something that I can own, and that\u2019s okay. I don\u2019t say this to brag to you at all, but something transformed in me through the art, through Growler, and through confronting my own autoimmune diseases and loving my body. I\u2019m trying to stay in my own lane and not speak for others, but more and more, I think we\u2019re in uncharted territory at the moment, and we really have to hold onto our humanity with all of our flaps.<\/p>\n