September 2025 / Cameron Day O’Connell

In the Back Space /

A Keening for the Disblessed Tongue by Cameron Day O’Connell

September 4 - 27, 2025

Opening Reception, Thursday, September 4, 5-8pm

Spring Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

A Keening for the Disblessed Tongue is a narrative of madness as the only route to purity in the eyes of God. The Eucharist here being smothered in hallucinatory honey and served on a dirty and shattered platter.

Cameron Day O’Connell draws on historical Irish folk practices of death and mourning, the stories of St. Gobnait (Irish saint of bees), folklore of the Banshee, and Ukrainian Saint Domna of Tomsk. These three figures act as the historical roots through which O’Connell explores loss and grief—integrating chaotic ritual, the Irish mourning practice of “telling the bees,” tales of hungry grass, disblessed holy wells, the Oracle of Delphi, transsexual orchids and their thynnid wasp counterparts; parasitic flowers, rot and decay, poisonous berries, salted wounds, fucked up coping mechanisms, weird nicotine-fueled dreams about the ocean; connection to the earth via ritual madness; death masks, HRT, drug use, and the belief that there is more than this. 

Predominantly a photographer and community herbalist, Cameron Day O’Connell explores new media and alternative printing processes with photographs on fabric and mixed-media sculpture to build a visual narrative about constructing one’s own spiritual practices around death and loss. In a world that rips away ties to land and the realms beyond, a world that separates us from the beauty of our own impending deaths, O’Connell attempts to weave a complex offering to the multitudes of tethers between us as people, the land, and everything else that we touch.

This work is the precursor to O’Connell’s project Living Eulogies: After David, a multimedia project conducting interviews with fellow trans community members to create complex “Living Eulogies” with and for us. The Living Eulogies project is generously funded in part by NWFF & The Warhol Foundation, Artist Trust, and 4Culture.