Frances Hennigan

Your eyes are melting me

2022

Your eyes are melting me leads the viewer into the gaming world. Her video guides you through a desolate and bleak landscape on the quest of the player. Your favourite streamer plays for your entertainment. She seems to sparkle, perfect in pink.

This work comes from a body of research into online subcultures such as political groups, gaming servers and ASMR communities. Drawing on content from interviews with members of these groups, this work offers an insight into group identities and their complex language and behavioural codes. Unignorable in this work is a prevailing sense of intense isolation and an avoidance of addressing this issue.

She addresses you, and only you, in her sweet, soft voice, through the camera. She shares with you her intimate thoughts about her world.

Where does she end and the character begin?

Could you share your honest opinions here, in this space?

How long can you tolerate being alone?

Where can you go when there is no space where you can belong?

BIO

Frances Hennigan is a visual artist from the west of Ireland, currently based in Berlin who frequently works in video, writing and exhibition making. In 2022 she completed her Master’s in Art & Research Collaboration. Hennigan’s practice investigates group identity and isolation in subcultures of contemporary Irish society. By creating fictional worlds based on codes of behavioural conduct and language conventions from existing online social communities’ new worlds are rendered in video and writing and often reference gaming, avatars and ‘rules of game’. 

Frances is co-founder of cruxx.project.net, a platform for offsite exhibition making in response to the land.