Episode 3

BRIDGET

Hello and welcome to ‘Deep Time’, a podcast in which we meet with artists to discuss time and its relationship to creative processes. With me, Bridget O'Gorman. Invoking the evolution of geological formation, ‘Deep Time’ is a non-conforming, collective research project, website and podcast series. It honours the accretion of knowledge inherent to crip, feminist, queer and decolonial thought.

‘Deep Time’ stems from ongoing research around holding space for my practice in a disabled body. It seeks to think about how complexifying what access is, and what it could be, might nourish broader approaches to working in the arts. Throughout the first half of 2025, I invited a group of artists and writers including D. Mortimer, Deirdre O’ Mahony, Libita Sibungu, Onyeka Igwe and Taey Iohe, to take part in virtual and in-person slow conversations about time, in relation to their own practice and its sustainment. Each participant was invited to make an offering, which reflected their experience, which can be found at deeptime.ie, an accessible online publication launched as part of EVA International 2025.

In today's episode, we are delighted to be joined by Taey Iohe, to talk about their work in progress as part of ‘Deep Time’. Taey is a trans-disciplinary artist, writer and listener, born near the Han River and now based near the River Lee and Ching. Rooted in collective care, humility and ecological belonging, Taey's practice embraces an eco-crip perspective across varied media, including soundscapes, language, moving image and social, collective engagement. Their work explores what leaks from the meta-narratives of our body and planet, perceiving leakage both as a sign of pain and as a potential path to healing.

Taey is a research associate at CCA Derry Londonderry and a Making Time resident at Artangel. They teach fine art at Chelsea College of Arts as a lecturer and Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths College as a visiting tutor. Taey's pronouns are they, them.

Welcome Taey! and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Firstly, I wanted to ask you about how you work in so many different capacities—as an artist, a writer, educator. I wonder if you could say a few words about your practice and how it's developed as such?

‍

TAEY

I think we all have many hats in life, don't we? But sometimes some hats are handed to us and sometimes we have to earn them. And being an artist for me is definitely something that I had to earn. And I feel I'm very lucky to be able to continue my living as an artist.

And the rest of it, I think, orbits around being an artist. I don't think I'm separating my life different from being a writer or educator or artist or someone's friend or someone's partner or someone's mother. It just all happens in the one line of time. So I think my practice is often a lot about negotiation between those responsibilities, really.

And sometimes you have to be quite flexible around what can be done with a limited time. I guess most of artists who are interested in history and the way we're making our order of time would say a very similar thing. That less interested in the main narrative, but more interested in what is hidden and what is not allowed in those main narratives.

BRIDGET

That's so interesting. This idea of being flexible and this idea of having a shared, almost one thing affecting another in your overall experience of navigating the world. There is a strong connection to the landscape and to wet landscapes, in particular in your inquiries. And I'm interested also in the nature of fluidity and shape-shifting from a crip perspective.

Morphing and leaking in the land and in the body is often categorised as something queer, perhaps undesirable, because it tends to be somewhat uncontrollable. Yet it's inevitable to both. And I just wonder if you could speak to the leaking as a concern in your work and also in terms of your embodied experience?

TAEY

To me, the leaking is a device where it's a condition that has happened within our time where ecological degradation is everywhere. That how the leaking is not just a symbol or condition, but it's something that we have to work with. In some ways, a form of the slow violence when the oil is leaking from the pipeline or when the toxicity is travelling through the river. It takes a very long time to get to make a strategy to how to deal with it.

But at the same time, leaking could be a slow repair process. How something or somebody is leaking out from the power of deconstruction, if you like. We are divided into different individuals or our bodies are separated from our soul. The cyclical rhythm of the leaking starts.

I live with not having five different organs in my body. And leaking is something that I have to deal with in daily life. And when you are going through so much pain and when pain becomes every day, you just have to accept sometimes. And it's not labelling into something else.

And pain definitely leaks out from our body.

BRIDGET

In my experience of rehabilitation and pain management, I've often been advised by therapists to forget the timeline. Suggesting that it's antithetical to the process of living with pain. And so I'm interested in this idea that if we can imagine in broader terms that we can actually forget the timeline. I wonder if you could say something about what an eco-crip perspective means to you?

TAEY

I think the forgetting the timeline in pain management, that's really interesting. The trauma also accumulated in a small and big way. And it makes a sediment, it makes a strata of the pain. I think some chronic pains or some unidentifiable nerve pain. There's so many pain that is not known what they are. There's no name for it. We don't know how to manage it. There's so many different ways of healing other than Western form of medicine. And that just tells us that something about the pain unpacks us.

Where does this come from and how fast and how isolated. And how can we deal with it collectively and remind us that this can't be done once or twice. It had to be dealt with many times. And who's going to do that and how do we recognize that as a human nature, but also as a part of labour as well.

There's many theories about the crip time and eco-crip and you can look it up. It's somehow over theorized and in some way, the disability studies or the way we see the body in a different way is very academic. Which I feel like who are we talking to?

Do we all able to understand all of that? If I may say, I think I'm really lucky to live very near forest. And there's many, many trees. It's an ancient woodland and they were saying it's coming from like the Neolithic times.

More than 10,000 years, which I can't really imagine what it's like. And there's so many different kinds of trees and people go there to enjoy them. And there's one particular tree that I met earlier this year. But it's like basically a tree without a trunk.

So the trunk is eaten by fungus and insects. So you only have a bark but without the core. But it's really, really tall and by the end of the skyline there's so many leaves. So it feels like a ghost of tree and I immediately felt really connected.

It's difficult to hug because there's no core. But it's like full of holes and you can see is that something is eaten from the inside. But still so flourishing. All the leaves are so green.

There's many forms of lives. And when I see those lives that is half bitten or half dead or you know of normal in some way. Or like really dry and I feel really connected too.

I feel like maybe that's the eco-crip. That understanding life happens in many different forms. And instead of thinking about how can we clean up this pollution and how can we punish the who did this to our ecosystem. I also recognize that -

but we still live in it. We still live with the toxin. We still live with the pollution. We also thrive.

We also have ability to revive ourselves. And however when people are trying to say okay this water is toxin. They give like ugly picture of the fish or you know fish has many eyes. It's just making people to think there's a normal form of living and these are not normal.

But to me I think it's bringing the sense of solidarity. It's kind of a turn taking. It's like we're taking turns. Okay this was the life started as a baby format—and then it becomes something else. It had interact with different sort of you know violence throughout the time. And they transformed into something else. They skinned something else – and they transformed into so-called disabled body. But what does that disabled meant in the first place? So we still live like that even through any illnesses and any pollutions.

BRIDGET

We do and I think it's one thing that my disability shows me often is there is great power in relinquishing control. I just love how you use the term I met a tree as opposed to I saw or encountered. There's something very interesting about kind of the language that you use in how you describe what you do and how you think. I'm interested in how you describe yourself as an artist, writer and particularly as a listener.

TAEY

I guess it's how we describe ourselves is a funny business. Like we never complete things and we are forever becoming into something we wish to be. And you know the language based artistic introduction that like bio always put us in the tricky position to define ourselves and where we come from. How do we say who we are?

I'm trying to make fun of those administrative rules sometimes. I want to be a listener rather than a professional listener. And I think I feel like my best ability as artist and as a human is probably being a good listener. Coming from South Korea when I came to the UK I didn't hear.

I couldn't understand. And that kind of coloured my world a lot. How I have to switch my way of understanding English language but also English culture. That this is so much hidden.

There's so many things in between the sentences and they say something positive but actually what they face says something negative. For instance if people say I'm good. What does the good mean? Or like when they say that's interesting.

What does that interesting mean? There's always some other layer. You know it's a one by one you realize. okay this language is not just linguistic but also cultural, also habitual and also interactive. Then you understand—okay how can you listen just as they are? or can I include something else in this listening?

There's an artist based in Dublin called Fiona Whelan. She's a really wonderful artist—mainly works with sort of the community and socially engaged practice. And she describes that she's never outside of listening. Which meaning is that she's not observing or she's listening as an outsider. She's a part of the listening. So when we listen to something she includes her positionality. For instance for her case include her Irishness or her race, her ethnicity, her age, her class.

Everything comes into her listening. And that feels very honest—to say that when we are talking about active listening or deep listening—whatever the listening is. People say something quite beautiful you know—pay attention to be empathetic and open your heart—or whatever this beautiful thing is. But actually the listening starts when I recognize which point I am meeting this life. And how do I see me to interacting with it. The listening already started there. The other life also say something back to me or make a sound. It doesn't have to be linguistic. Then you include all those conditions in the listening. And in some way listening is a very passive and submissive.

And when people say I'm listening to you. I mean I was in that position many times. But that authoritarian ‘I am listening—you do the talk’. That already gives a hierarchy.

I don't think active listening does the trick. It's more of understanding where the listening motivation coming from. And what to follow up after the listening. That's the part of the listening I think.

So as I said I'm not an expert in listening. But I do love to think that listening defines my practice. I'd love to be a better listener.

BRIDGET

It's so interesting how you describe this idea of how we listen. I guess my journey towards this kind of attempt to listen—has involved a really kind of personal journey around having to learn to listen to my body. The context in which I've travelled here from..as a white person as somebody who is a woman—you know—disabled person. And I really want to try to see how we can sort of create environments together. Which allows ourselves to kind of just come and be.

TAEY

I mean you mentioned about like your whiteness. And how does that sit with in the group. And also like can we just be and listen to each other. That's very hard I think.

I think the reason why our retreat was so special. Is because we didn't need to explain ourselves so much. But also we understood the differences and limits. And allow ourselves to be free. And I think that creating an atmosphere or creating a room to be who you are. That sometimes that's the work. And I think you made that work.

You made that is possible. But that's really, really rare. Most of time I think those intersectionality whether you are disabled or queer, or different race, different power structure that always comes in—in the room. Whether you say it or not. And the people who are more privileged position, they wish that conversation goes seamlessly and painlessly. And there's many thoughts in the other side. That they have to choose how much of the level of conflict would I allow to be here or not.

And I'm struggling with that as well—am I ready to say something honest how I feel? Or do I want to play along in the room? And when someone is so not ready to talk about it..do I want to leave the room. What's the boundarie? What's the margin that I would not wanting to cross.

BRIDGET

I guess I would really like to ask you..I know that your work is still in progress. I wonder if you could share some thoughts around that work as it's developing?

TAEY

I was really, really loving the time that we had it together. In the Burren. In the Common Knowledge [Centre]. And one thing—It was quite special and magical for me—but one thing was really grabbed me was the lichen. Lichen in the tree. And there's many different names for it. And my favorite name is the witch's whiskers. And that's so queer and I just love it. And I was trying to capture some visuals. It doesn't do the justice. But in real life it was so magical. It was green and silver. And make me think a lot about a different time.

And lichen. I was interested in lichen for a while. Because lichen is normally the indicator how much the areas are polluted or not. So it's kind of guidance for us.

This area is really clean. So I kind of researched about this beard lichen. And it's used for medicinal things. That's part of why there was like a witchcraft-ness in there.

And using this as a sort of healing thing. And the lichen developed just so long ago. It's more than any rocks and more than, longer than any mountains. Half fungus and half algae. But it's not a plant. It's not a bacterium. But this mutant of the fungus and algae, they have to work together in order to live. They only grow in the tree trunk that is unwell. So that's also a really fascinating part. This particular lichen, they love unwell trees. It really comes down to that long-ness of how long this lichen has been there.

So I was writing a letter. Writing a letter is a form of my practice also. And I was kind of writing as if I'm the witch's whiskers. And writing some kind of, you know, the story to it. And I went to a day of resistance in Mount Sperrin last week. And someone was telling me about this idiom, Irish idiom. I can't pronounce it, you may know this. A woman told me that a woman told her. Kind of really fascinating that how the histories are passing through the time without the record. But only by people's mouth. You know, that kind of sort of oral history is everywhere.

But that idiom was so telling about the Irish culture from my perspective. And the feeling that lichen is so ancient and passing through the time from people's story. That was really fascinating. And I wanted to kind of bring another scene, which was, there's a parliament building—Stormont—in Northern Ireland.

And I went to one of the rooms, Senate chamber. And I was really struck by how colonial the building is. And this particular room is meant to be for the debate chamber. But now there's no function really.

So it's used as an event room. And it's such a theatrical place. It was really inviting to dig a bit more. And I was really sort of touching the surface of this linen, like pink linen as a back panel.

And like everything about that room was shouting as toxic colonial relationship to the nature. Like for instance, the bench is from Australia, walnut table is made in English walnut. So the hierarchy between bench and table is also interesting. And speaker's chair was from South Africa.

And mahogany on the window place was from Nigeria. And ceiling was from Canada. And everything was so perfectly planned, what this room should be. And there's like three symbols of agricultural and shipbuilding and linen as a symbol of Northern Ireland.

And that agriculture and shipbuilding and linen, that's also very colonial relationship, how you want to use the land as a coloniser. And the one corner of this fabric was, I think is from the very famous Irish linen makers. They're no longer making the same patterns. And it was so worn.

It was very strangely worn. And that sort of scruffiness and tattiness was almost crumbling as if this room's purpose is also crumbling. And yeah, I kind of thought that states what we make of the nation is compared to the like—it's so minute, it's so short lived. We only have this life, such a small time. You know, the room was like made in 1950s. And, you know, only the Good Friday Agreement was happening in 1998. Compared to the time that land was already there and the people came. That's, I just thought that is a contrast that I really want to bring it in. And it's introduction for me that how would I want to relate to the nature in Ireland as someone who coming from very different place.

BRIDGET

That's so, that's really so interesting. This idea of these different timeframes and this evidence of extraction.

TAEY

Time is already so colonial construct. How we divide the day and night and different horizon and different location of the earth divided into 24 hours and 12 months, 365 days. You know, when we are looking at the logic of a calendar, it's combined with mistake, combined with who had the power at the time. And knowing that how the moon works and how tide works. This was all very treacherous information. Not everybody had information. And using those information translates into standardized time is already the colonial operation. And, you know, when we are thinking about the access to time, I feel like, you know, some cultures have a different relationship to how we read time as a past and the present and the future. And some cultures doesn't have like a past tense, for instance, everything happens in the present tense. And some cultures, they see future through the past. And that's very engraved into how they live. And all of these things asking us to see the time in very different way.

BRIDGET

The Deep Time podcast is devised by myself and produced by Paul McGregor, consisting of three episodes with the support of Hannah Wallis and Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Deep Time is made possible through the EVA International Platform Commission, Ireland's Art Biennial, Field Arts and the Arts Council's Visual Arts Project Award. Music courtesy of Audio Network.