Day Magee
Day Magee greets me over video call from the common room of his student flat. All grubby off-white walls, cheap plywood kitchen cabinetry, and dated furniture and fittings, it’s a space weathered by the yearly turnaround of undergraduates to Limerick School of Art and Design, where Day, a performance and visual artist, studies. Low slung March sunlight streams in, its glare silhouetting homemade bunting and a plant straining upward on the sill, two of the few human touches to soften the room’s cold sparsity.
With a loosely rolled cigarette hanging from his mouth, Day leads me to his makeshift studio – a spot cleared on the tiled floor – aiming the camera of his phone at a metres-long sheet of painted sandpaper. A work in progress, the piece is based on Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, in which the resurrected Jesus Christ guides the doubting apostle’s finger into a wound on the saviour’s torso.
Day’s interpretation sees a quartet of muscular humanoid figures rendered in primary shades of blue and yellow, roughly daubed but discernible. It is charged with a homoerotic current. “I’m revisiting my childhood,” he remarks. “I was brought up on a very American, dancing in the aisles and speaking in tongues evangelical Christianity. Bible stories are coming up a lot.” His father was converted by American missionaries who visited Ireland in the 80s. His mother, once a militant atheist, soon followed.
We move to the kitchen table, Day propping his phone against a biography of Francis Bacon and a book titled Queer Spirits. Rolling another cigarette, he recounts an episode from early adolescence that might be considered by some as school changing room banter, and by others, more accurately, as sexual assault. In a state of undress, a classmate set himself on Day to the amusement of those gathered. It was his earliest experience of same-sex attraction, and the beginning of a fraught negotiation of sexuality, faith and family.
That episode culminated in Day covertly seeking counsel from a so-called conversion therapist, who diagnosed demonic possession no less. “It hugely impacted me. I remember him standing over me, shaking me. It was very theatrical,” Day recalls between sharp draws on his cigarette, joking that the spectacle of it all may have spawned the interest in performance he would go on to pursue. Only years later would he open up to his parents about the encounter–and his queer identity. He came out to them via a slip of paper, sliding his revelation across the table. “So what? We love you,” was his father’s response.
Pleasant surprise soon yielded to stewing unease, his parents increasingly attempting to sew seeds of doubt in their son, suggesting he and his sexuality were still in development. As Day grew more overtly feminine, experiencing mild gender dysphoria, and experimenting with oestrogen on an ad hoc basis, acquired from a couple of trans girls he knew – an approach he advises against – his relationship with his father grew distant. Coming out as non-binary left him crestfallen, he says, enveloping the camera in a dens mist as he speaks, having traded cigarette for vape. “His child was so unlike him – so other.”
A snarl of loose renaissance curls falls to the nape of Day’s neck. His fleece, two sizes too big, is unzipped to the chest, exposing a flash of pale skin stretched over collar bone. He occupies a neutral space somewhere and nowhere between the poles of binary gender identity and expression, having decided to stop transitioning some time ago. “I felt I was hopping from one box to another.” He talks of his mother, who said God revealed himself to her at the moment of Day’s conception, telling her that she would have a boy. “She would recount this story to me, and it would hurt. I don’t see myself as a boy.”
In many ways, Day's very first outing as a performance artist accurately prefigured his practice today; somewhat visionary, it’s unsurprising given the highly accomplished conceptual level he is working at now, so early in his career. “I feel like I’ve been making the same piece over and over again, and it’s just been becoming more itself over time.” It was an immersive, multidisciplinary and visceral piece in his secondary school.
Comprising photography, film, poetry, drawings, and culminating in a performance involving horns, rope, fake blood, and a sheep’s heart thrown into the audience, he staged the work in the school hall and charged a euro in. “It was before I had any conception of editing–or taste,” he laughs, surprising himself on recollection that he was allowed to put it on at all. In a show of support, his mother came to see it, and left quite bothered. “She thought there was a dark spirit working through me.”
One might reasonably expect Day to harbour some bitterness towards his parents, given the impact of their fire and brimstone fundamentalism on the negotiation of his identity. Rather, a love deep and hard won prevails. He speaks warmly of great healing, found in particular during the last year of his father’s life, who died a year and a half ago. “When you lose a parent, your genetic source, you review your entire relationship in a very accelerated way.” He addressed the loss of his father in Keening Garden Door, a series of performances of wailing, ecstatic grief, in which artist and audience shared in the freedom offer by such primordial emotional outpouring.
Ultimately, despite the emotional intensity and volatility of his parents, their spirituality and his upbringing – or perhaps because of it – Day preaches compassion. “Theirs were a very particular set of beliefs that they were trying to reconcile with life as it was happening before them in their child.” Through his artistic practice today, Day kneads the hardship he experienced; spreading the sense of the pain – emotional or otherwise – he has felt among those gathered to witness, while invoking the catharsis such expression allows. Even though it was all very difficult, he says, he wouldn’t change anything. “I’ve led a very blessed life.”
