Features

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Hybrasil House (relational aesthetics, assemblage art, dialogical essay collection)

Art therapy meets eco therapy meets ancestral veneration in this Oldenburgean “third place” — a half-acre residential campus on the edge of Austin, Texas, where Zaelí & her guests swap insights on their desire to cultivate village in a multicultural world, while making beauty out of broken household items & creek-culled trash.

Inspired by Zaelí’s family heritage as the quintessential hosts to scholarly & artistic visitors of the legendary Blasket Islands, Hybrasil House enters questions of community, survival, heritage, and hope through imaginings of that rugged Irish isle and the stories it safeguarded for generations today.

Away With the Fa*ries (one woman show)

Away With the Fa*ries delivered a traditional Gaelic perspective on the world-scrambling wonders of

In offering this harrowing yet humorous tale of abduction by the wise & mischievous beings of the Otherworld (a supernatural dimension of Irish lore), the audience is invited to re-enter their own stories of confusion, torment, and lost time with a renewed sense of acceptance & possibility.

The Incorrigible Nymph at Battle Bend: An Exploration of Unconditional Love (relational aesthetics, performance art)

Roving the Williamson Creek in litter-based ‘couture’, the character of an eternally springing sprite who could love any body of water — however polluted — seduces whomever she comes across into revealing their favorite spots, deepest fears, and unconscious sentiments for the sediments of this most essential element.

Drawing lighthearted, non-preachy attention to the actual condition of Austin’s watershed, famous for its beloved urban springs, this intermittent and ongoing project urges conversation about the effect our rapidly growing waste must have on the wildlife Texans so naturally cherish.

Prayer Hands (living sculpture at Hybrasil House)

Comprised of shattered granite that was once the top of an engraved communion table, Prayer Hands is an invitation to intuitively rearrange the pieces into new formations, as a means of practicing empty-mind, drawing inducing trance, facilitating time outdoors, and routinely dwelling in reflection of Ancestral experience.

The communion table, which had been installed into the granite sub-floor of her kitchen by a previous owner, could only be removed by sledgehammer. 

At the time of these renovations in 2016, Zaelí found the table to be incredibly creepy, and preferred it as raw material for path-making throughout the yard. 

The pieces spent four years dispersed throughout both sides of the half-acre property, until, during the Covid pandemic of 2020+, Zaelí decided to dig around and gradually bring them back together, originally with the hope of reassembling the prayer hands image.

“It took me about eight months to accept that it would never go back together the way it was,” she reflects in her Artist Statement for the work’s inaugural exhibit, Violet Lemonade.

“I use it now as a meditative tool, a way of exercising my revised intention to be grateful for the spiritual traditions of my ancestors — which got them through pain I can barely imagine — while at the same time acting out my right to direct a new relationship with the rituals and icons passed down to me.”

Prayer Hands is currently in transition to become a permanent mosaic for The Keening Corner, another Hybrasil House installation.

We’ll Pray For You (performance art)

Retired since lockdown — this interactive, stand up-driven monthly stand up showcase hosted & produced by Zaelí at Austin’s iconic Coldtowne Theater let seasoned performers & innocent audience members collaborate in moments of deep cathartic reconciliation (and communal pizza consumption), through sermons, confessions, and punchline penance.