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There’s little doubt that Aoife Dunne was always
destined for greater things. She started a web design business by the age of 12, made a short film (shown at the Beijing Film Festival) by the age of 13, started a career in fashion at 16 whilst winning a scholarship to the Royal Irish Academy of Music. She was on track to becoming a professional dancer before she decided to go to NCAD to pursue a career in visual art. Aoife Dunne is now 26. Pause, inhale, draw breath. She’s had three rejections before our lunchtime meeting on the grounds of IMMA, where she starts a six-month residency this month. This is the sort of blow which would have most of us reaching for the duvet to block out the world for the day. Dunne remains utterly unfazed, taking it in her stride, and only casually dropping it into conversation. Less of a wellspring of creativity, more of a geyser – Dunne is the ultimate, compelling, one-woman show creating her own future in the present. “I was super curious from a very early age. Dunne’s innate curiosity found her pushing the bounds of what she could realise and achieve. “I’d go to skips and get found materials and I felt so out of place, very confused. I was a crazy kid,” she says. “It’s so in my nature to say, ‘Yeah I can do it,’ and then go figure it out.” Her restless mind sees Dunne awake at 5am churning ideas. There’s a self-sufficient resourcefulness which permeates all her work, and this was instilled in an unconventional upbringing of her own making. “I had no real interest in typical teenage things like fancying boys,” she asserts. “All of my focus was on my interests, my own identity, my own skills. If something confused me, I loved that… getting to the bottom of things.” Whether that was passing out business cards to local shops or creating her short film for The Ark in which she “shot it from the knee down,” make sculptures in my back garden. Being resourceful was encouraged growing up. I made my own clothes, spray painted my trainers. If I had had the money, I wouldn’t have forced myself to be inventive.” When Dunne entered the fashion world as a stylist and art director, she Nadine Coyle’d about her age. “Clothing was one of my first modes of expression where I could fabricate identity through it and escape my physical self. As a kid, I would go to the shop as a new person every day. I thought it was exciting to escape from me. Styling is reusing layers, collaging and I saw the body as a sculpture and a form of moving art. My editorials were very out there and bizarre.” Needless to say, Dunne’s output didn’t just land on local pages but ended up gracing style bibles such as Nylon in Japan and i-D. A thread which connects her work is a fascination with “identity, fantasy, escapism, technology, the future”. She recognises these as the same thought processes she had as a kid – “wanting to move beyond the physical realm.” It’s evident in the immersive, interactive, environments she creates – ones which fuse sculpture, video, sound, performance, technology, and costume. “I love sci-fi. I am really inspired by the vision of the future in the 1920s and ‘50s and their vision and what they thought space suits looked like. I like that trashy, non-futuristic, future,” she says. It’s also abundantly clear that a love of Japanese culture permeates her output, even though she’s never been there. “I don’t know where it came from but I’m obIf I had had the money, I wouldn’t have forced myself to be inventive. 18