VISUAL is pleased to present This is how I say yes by Holly Márie Parnell. This exhibition comprises two films by the artist: Cabbage (2023) and hole in the stone (2025).

The title of the exhibition is taken from a line spoken by the artist’s brother David Parnell via the eye-tracking technology that facilitates his communication. An intimate work made in collaboration with the filmmaker’s family, Cabbage re-frames language and explores personal agency within an ableist society. It centralises her brothers' digital and rhythmic writings, and her mother’s reflections on a life lived having to prove her son’s humanity. Moving between contrasts of lived experience and bureaucratic violence, the film is a subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued.

hole in the stone captures a community of small farmers in Wexford and Carlow. The film records cycles of human and animal existence alongside each other, in a landscape shaped by a way of life that is disappearing, and becoming ever more difficult to sustain. Despite these challenges, the film also captures the determination to keep going, and the joy and dignity of harbouring new life in the shelter of old barns. Captured offscreen in a pub gathering, farmers describe, after so many years, the still-potent effect of the birth of a calf: “It breathes new life into you.”

While concerned with apparently different subjects, the two films share a meditative mood that taps into the stubborn and disobedient, in contexts of both personal and communal forms of resistance. Fixed shots and recorded asides provide portraits of a place and time through an accumulation of glimpses. They contain a political message, measured in tone yet damning in their record of people and places failed by larger structural inequalities.

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Accompanying texts can be found in the gallery and on VISUAL’s website:

Stone and Liquid by Graeme Arnfield has been commissioned by VISUAL for This is how I say yes.

Just Words by Alice Hattrick was originally published on the occasion of a screening of Cabbage and a Q&A with curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais at FORMA HQ, Thursday 2 May 2024.

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Holly Márie Parnell is an artist filmmaker based between the UK and County Wexford. Working in film and expanded cinema, her practice looks at ideas around connectedness - exploring tensions between intimacy and alienation, and the ways in which fundamental needs are being threatened and eroded within our current economic and institutional frameworks. Taking a documentary approach, the work is led by personal encounters and is motivated by the subtle yet powerful truths of embodied knowledge and lived experience.

Her work has been shared across Ireland, the UK and abroad, with exhibitions at Sirius Arts Centre, TULCA, The Model Sligo, Mermaid Arts Centre and London’s Jupiter Woods and Forma. Recent screenings include Hot Docs Toronto, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Galway Film Fleadh, Cork International Film Festival, Filmhuis Cavia Amsterdam, WORM Rotterdam and Kassel Dokfest, Germany among others. She is an alumnus of Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship, and an MFA graduate of the Slade.

Cabbage credits:

Direction, Camera, Edit Holly Márie Parnell

Words David Parnell

Sound Design Holly Márie Parnell & Jenna Whelan

Sound Mix Andrew Beaton

Titles and Graphics Sam Williams

Advisors James Casey & Peter Kearns of Independent Living Movement

Developed with aemi, FLAMIN
Funded by Arts Council Ireland, FLAMIN, Canada Council

hole in the stone credits:

Direction, Camera, Edit Holly Márie Parnell

Producer Ane Lopez

Assistant Edit Tina Darova, Ane Lopez

Sound Design Tom Fisher of Action Pyramid / Holly Márie Parnell

Graphic Design Paul Bailey

Colour Grade and Online Edit Michael Higgins

Funded by Screen Scotland, Scottish Documentary Institute