Who Do We Become When Things Are Gone?

2026 · Durational performance and single-channel video

Cow House Studios Residency, Ireland

Live performance duration: approximately 40 minutes

Video excerpt: 8:26

Black and white with sound


Who Do We Become When Things Are Gone? explores identity as something fluid, layered and continually renegotiated.

Black-and-white image of a woman seated on the forest floor, lifting a garment from an open storage box among tall conifers.

Developed during a residency at Cow House Studios in May 2026, the work emerged alongside changing understandings of neurodivergence, perception and belonging. It asks what remains when familiar roles, assumptions and certainties begin to fall away, opening space for new ways of seeing, understanding and becoming.


The performance unfolds through a personal archive of garments and objects accumulated across different periods of Muller’s life and artistic practice. Vintage chests, a childhood rocking horse made by her father, recurring performance costumes, travel clothing and other material traces are carried into the forest, unpacked, handled and gradually suspended along a washing line constructed within the landscape.


These objects operate as more than belongings. They become markers of lived time, former identities, working roles, movement, memory and self-perception. 



The Performance


The original work developed as an approximately 40-minute live durational performance during the Cow House Studios residency.


Through slow, repetitive handling and rearrangement, garments and objects associated with different phases of life and practice are brought into relation with one another. Rather than presenting a linear autobiography, the work allows multiple former selves and identities to coexist within the same space.


The forest functions as both setting and holding environment: a place in which these accumulated traces can be unpacked, encountered and temporarily reordered.



Video Work


The performance was subsequently developed into a black-and-white single-channel video excerpt of 8:26 minutes.


The film distils the longer durational work while retaining its emphasis on gesture, material, repetition and the relationship between body, object and landscape.


Within the Wider Trajectory


Within Landscape as Mirror, Self as Myth, Who Do We Become When Things Are Gone? occupies a transitional position.


Following Trinity, where recurring symbolic figures are brought into relation, this work turns toward the material remains of those identities themselves.


Costumes and garments that had previously appeared across separate performances are gathered together as an accumulated archive. The emphasis shifts from inhabiting a particular symbolic figure toward reconsidering what is carried forward, what is relinquished, and how identity continues to be reconstructed over time.


Full screening file and further documentation available on request.