Vicky Langan is a Cork-based artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly sound, performance, and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art. Using simple raw materials such as domestic objects, hair and magnetic tape, she layers physical gestures and scraps of sound to create intensely personal imaginary landscapes. Mundane domesticity is explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious. Her decade-long filmmaking partnership with filmmaker and critic Maximilian Le Cain has resulted in sixteen moving image works to date, with screenings and retrospectives of their work having been shown throughout the world. She is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award 2019/20, as well as bursary awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Cork City Council and Music Network.
“Vicky Langan is an artist who melts borders ... the territories of visual/art/performance/music/film/sound all overlap and co-emerge in her articulate presence. She is difficult to define yet easy to follow, and it is this quality of empathic otherness that makes you concentrate on every sound, every move she makes.”
- Alice Maher, Visual Artist
"Through her solo work…Irish artist Vicky Langan has gained a reputation for raw and intense performances that are as likely to leave audiences feeling deeply unsettled as profoundly moved. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate physical theatre loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan's work sits between sound and performance art."
-Daniel Spicer, The Wire magazine
"There are some musicians who entertain us, fine; some who stimulate us, better; and then some who immerse us in something so powerful that almost, primal emotions surface instantly; making us ultra-defensive, or, finally open to illumination. One of the latter is Vicky Langan. You may love her, hate her, be astonished, be repelled - but you will not be unmoved. Promise. In a world of bland shite we need to treasure artists like this - even if they burn..."
-Bernard Clarke, NOVA, RTÉ Lyric Fm
Vicky Langan is supported by Music Network's Music Capital Scheme, funded by The Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. Music Network is funded by The Arts Council of Ireland.
