Auryn: Full Circle
2021–2023
Performance, self-portraiture, digital photography and moving image
Ireland and North Evia, Greece
A visual myth of descent, rupture and return - told through body, land and image.
Auryn: Full Circle is a long-form self-portrait and performance project created across Irish woodlands and the fire-scarred landscapes of North Evia, Greece. Developed between 2021 and 2023, the work brings documentary observation, symbolic performance and lived experience into direct relation, exploring ecological rupture, psychological transformation and renewal.
The project unfolded through repeated returns to changing landscapes rather than a predetermined visual script. As wildfire-damaged forests moved from blackened devastation toward uncertain regeneration, the figure within them was also undergoing a period of profound personal and neurological reorientation. Gradually, the distinction between inner and outer landscape began to collapse.
Landscape as Mirror
What began as observation gradually became a recognition that the landscape and the self were undergoing parallel processes of rupture, adaptation and return. The fire-scarred forest was no longer simply the location of the work; it became a physical environment through which internal states could be encountered, tested and made visible.
"It’s like this landscape is going through it in real time.
I’ve been going through it in real time."
"It’s like it’s an externalization, like a visual, a real tangible
visual externalization of my current state of play and being."
Perception, Identity & Discovery
Auryn: Full Circle was already well underway before Muller discovered in 2022 that she had been living with a traumatic brain injury sustained in childhood. By that point, she had completed Marina Abramović Institute’s Cleaning the House training and had already made two visits to the fire-scarred landscapes of North Evia.
The work’s recurring figures, intuitive performances, symbolic actions and engagement with altered landscapes had therefore emerged before the neurological explanation was known.
The discovery did not initiate the work; it transformed how the work could be understood. It reframed long-standing questions around perception, identity, fragmentation, intuition and symbolic thinking, and gave another context to material that had already been developing through image and performance.
Material & Symbolic Language
A recurring white garment moves through the project as both costume and changing surface. The figure had developed through earlier self-portrait and performance work, but within Auryn the garment became materially bound to the landscape itself.
During the first visit to North Evia (2021) , ash from a 2,500-year-old olive tree destroyed in the wildfire was pressed into the dress during the first rains. Across subsequent encounters, the garment absorbed ash, water, mud, weather and terrain - carrying physical traces of the environments through which the work moved.
The project extends this material logic into its installation form.
Selected photographic prints are conceived as torn, burned, stained or embedded with ash, allowing rupture to occur not only within the image but within the photographic object itself.
Process
Auryn developed through repeated return, observation and spontaneous performance. Muller worked alone with a Leica M system and 21mm lens, using natural light, interval shooting and extended periods of presence within each location.
Rather than constructing poses in advance, the work evolved through an intuitive response to weather, terrain, light and bodily sensation.
Locations were revisited across different stages of regeneration, allowing environmental change itself to influence the development of the narrative.
“I really trust that intuitive space.”
“I’ve been translating a little bit of what it wants
to say and a little bit of what I want to say.”
Training & Development
The project developed alongside a period of intensive artistic and psychological enquiry. In 2021, Muller completed Marina Abramović Institute’s Cleaning the House training immediately before beginning work in North Evia. In 2022, she began Jungian study through Art as a Path of Inner Schooling, deepening an existing interest in archetype, individuation and the relationship between image and unconscious process.
From 2023–24, the project entered a new material phase through an Arts & Disability Connect mentorship with bookbinder and artist Laurie Legrand, focused on developing a sustainable artist-book prototype and exploring how the digital and performative work might translate into physical form.
The work was also developed during a period of significant personal strain and caregiving responsibility, adding another layer to the project’s exploration of instability, memory, survival and reorientation.
Exhibition & Installation
Auryn: Full Circle extends beyond the photographic series into moving image, sound, text, performance and material installation. The work can be presented as a focused selection of photographic works or expanded into a more immersive environment in which image, sound, damaged material surfaces and moving image form a wider sequence of descent, rupture and return.
The installation is conceived with restraint: individual works are given space to operate independently while remaining part of a larger psychological and material journey.
Selected Exhibitions & Presentations
2025 — Mythologies of the Personal & the Land, Luan Gallery, Athlone, Ireland - curated by Miguel Amado
2025 — Hiraeth, FÍSL – Icelandic Contemporary Photography Association, Egilsstaðir, Iceland
2023 — I-Inversion, Hudpromloft, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Curated by Vlad Nickorchuk | Marta Levytska
2022 — Herna, FÍSL – Icelandic Contemporary Photography Association, Reykjavik, Iceland
2022 — From Ashes, Solo exhibition, Corinth International Photography Festival, Greece
Support
Arts & Disability Connect — Mentorship Funding (2023)
Arts Council of Ireland — Agility Award (2022)
Westmeath County Council Arts Office — project support (2021)
Community Crowdfunding support — GoFundMe (2021)
Within Landscape as Mirror, Self as Myth
Auryn: Full Circle marks a pivotal point within the wider trajectory of Landscape as Mirror, Self as Myth. Earlier works including RiMo, Elemental: The Prologue, Chapter One: The Path of Least Resistance and The Well of Bottled Emotion had already established recurring figures, symbolic performance and landscape as spaces through which psychological states could be encountered.
Within Auryn, these strands converge with lived rupture and real ecological transformation. Landscape becomes explicitly both external environment and psychological field, while the recurring figure carries material and symbolic traces across a process of descent, fragmentation and return.
The work forms a bridge toward later projects including Trinity, where previously separated symbolic figures move toward integration, and Who Do We Become When Things Are Gone?, where identity itself is reconsidered through accumulated objects, garments and material traces.
Selected photographic works, moving-image material and expanded installation formats from Auryn: Full Circle are available for exhibition and curatorial presentation. Full screening files, installation documentation, technical information and additional high-resolution imagery are available on request.