The 2022 exhibition Persona used photography and augmented reality to allow ten artists with intellectual disabilities to construct and reveal imagined identities.
Created by Martin Maguire with That’s Life, the project was presented at Galway’s Black Box Theatre.
Ten primordial elements becoming personal characters
Each participant selected one of ten elements associated with Greek mythology: air, sky, water, earth, day, night, the underworld, darkness, love or time.
The group explored these ideas through movement, spoken word, drawing, costume and performance. Sandra O’Malley of Blue Raincoat Theatre supported the physical work, while costume designer Sharon Gilham translated participants’ drawings into clothing and props.
Questions about life, death, love and loss informed the development of each character.
Portraits changing through a screen
The main photographs showed the participants posing without their mythological costumes. When visitors viewed them through a smart device, augmented-reality layers revealed the alternate persona chosen and designed by the individual.
This interaction made the audience’s first impression unstable. A person initially encountered through an ordinary portrait could appear again through a self-directed identity built from image, sound and performance.
Maguire developed the project around the barriers created by bias, assumption and hurried judgement. Rather than asking how society could describe the participants more accurately, Persona asked what happened when they controlled the description themselves.
The exhibition’s technology served that purpose rather than functioning as spectacle. Augmented reality exposed additional layers only when the viewer chose to spend time looking.