“CERTAIN INDIVIDUAL WOMEN”
“Certain Individual Women” is an award-winning project that responds to inherent gender inequality in Irish law and society. It began as a book-length poem that features three distinct but overlapping elements: two personae, one based on the poet’s own experiences, and one based on her maternal grandmother, who grew up in the border town of Ravensdale, Co. Louth at the dawn of the Irish Free State. These poems are weaved around a series of docupoems constructed from Irish legislation and the 1937 Constitution, informed by Morrissy’s legal training. Combining lyric sequence with documentary legal poems, Morrissy draws on her backgrounds in law, creative writing, and activism for reproductive justice (as co-founder of X-ile Project). Through an aesthetic of interruption, “Certain Individual Women” is an intergenerational examination of womxn’s access to power and gender-based discrimination with regard to Irish law, currently and historically.
Outcomes of this expansive project include a poetry-play, gallery exhibition, live performances, moving image and animation, a performance film, an experimental pamphlet, national radio broadcast, and international poetry publications, including The Manchester Review, Poetry Ireland Review (#130 & #122), Winter Papers, The North, bath magg , gorse , and Law and Literature: The Irish Case. Poetry from the project was exhibited in the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, 2020: The Law is a White Dog, published in the TULCA Exhibition Book, and featured on the TULCA 2020 Podcast Series: Episode 9, with analysis by Máiréad Enright (Birmingham Law School). The project has drawn international academic engagement, including from the Northern/Ireland Feminist Constitutional Futures Project, Doing Feminist Legal Work, and the Irish Network for the Legal Humanities (INLH). INLH co-founder Adam Hanna writes about the project in his monograph Poetry, Politics and the Law in Modern Ireland. An essay and an excerpt from “Certain Individual Women” will be published in the forthcoming volume Feminist Constitutional Futures (Birmingham UP).
As an ephemeral and site-specific performance, “Certain Individual Women” integrates animation, moving image and performative elements. These performances were made in collaboration with animator and technician Annick Counihan. An experimental pamphlet titled Performances in All Directions, designed by Emma Conway, was published in November 2020. The pamphlet features a four-part essay, alongside a collection of field notes and research images. In 2020 Morrissy collaborated with filmmaker Alisha Doody to produce a 26-minute performance film of “Certain Individual Women”. The film and its corresponding pamphlet were launched by the UCD Foundation in May 2021. Film screenings include Culture Night 2021 at the National Library of Ireland, the Doing Feminist Legal Work symposium, the Critical Legal Conference at Durham Law School, and the Beacon Fellowship Series at Concordia University, Montréal. It was an official selection of the Toronto Women’s International Film Festival for August 2021, and the LA Independent Women Film Awards in September 2021. The film is exhibited in full at HOAX.
In 2021, Morrissy was a recipient of the MAKE Theatre Residency Award, during which she began working on a poetry-play from the project titled “Certain Individual Women” A Movement. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop the theatre adaptation, and was selected as a playwriting participant at the 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. In 2023, Fishamble: The New Play Company presented readings from the play with actors Juliette Crosbie, Esther Ayo James, and Hannah James Scott at the O’Donoghue Theatre, University of Galway and at the University of Notre Dame Dublin Gateway. Morrissy will again collaborate with Fishamble for a play reading at TUS Limerick in May 2024. Her play was also developed at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s Script Club in March 2024.