life is art is life
by Margaret Cahill
I came to know the performance artist Maurice Fitzgibbon only in the last years of his life but through conversations we had, interviews I conducted with colleagues and friends of his, and thorough deep engagement with his corpus of works, I have been able to piece together the fascinating story of his life and his passion for performance art. My biography of Fitzgibbon, Life is Art is Life, will be published by Artisma Press next year, on Jan 28th 2028, the second anniversary of his death.
Maurice Fitzgibbon was renowned for his attempts to break down, what he considered to be artificial barriers between life and art. The originator of the term, Engaged Immersion, his work has been lauded for its authenticity and for the artist’s willingness to totally submerge himself in his art. Fitzgibbon gained widespread coverage in both national and international media early in his career, including being the subject of major features in Time and People magazines. His work has been widely discussed on Arts Shows on both radio and TV and has been the subject of numerous academic papers, but in his latter years he refused all interviews, believing that the work should speak entirely for itself. His reluctance to court celebrity seems to have only served to increase his following, as was evident from the attendance at his funeral and the outpourings of grief on social media following his death in January of last year.
Fitzgibbon was born in the townland of Belmullet in Co.Mayo on February 11, 1969, the only child of parents Michael and Hester. Their thatched cottage had been built by Fitzgibbon’s grandfather in 1892. It was situated on the western shore of Carrowmore Lake, a remote and isolated location, even by Mayo standards. In an interview about his childhood, he remarked that:
“Other children grew up watching Wanderley Wagon, drinking water from taps and eating dinners cooked in fancy electric ovens. We were still hauling water from the lake, lighting kerosene lamps at night and cooking on the open hearth. It was like something you’d see in a heritage museum.”
It was a reclusive household, with his parents taking only occasional trips to town for essentials that they could not produce on the farm. Unusually for the time, they did not go to mass, GAA matches or the pub so little if known his parents by people in the area. Fitzgibbon was considered an odd child by those he went to school with. One former classmate at Knocklackan National School remarked on a Radio 5 Wales documentary that “He kept to himself mostly and didn’t seem to have friends. He’d never play football with the rest of us at break time no matter how much grief the teachers gave him about it. He’d sit by himself in the bicycle shed reading or drawing. He was always drawing.”
According to an artist bio written to accompany an early exhibition, Fitzgibbon left home in 1985, at the age of 16, following an intense row with his father about cutting his hair, which had grown to shoulder-length, as was the style among teenage boys in Ireland at the time. There have been unverified reports that he lived at a New Age traveller camp in Devon before settling in a hippy commune in Andalusia in Spain. A conjecture that he spent five years living with a cave-dwelling, Berber family in the small Tunisian town of Matmata, was the subject of a Reddit thread that ran from 2013 – 2015. In truth, little is really known of the artist’s whereabouts during these years or if he produced art at this time.
The death of both of Fitzgibbon’s parents of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty gas heater in 2007 was the impetus for his return home to Ireland. On the night of their funeral, having spent the entire day drinking in a Belmullet pub, Fitzgibbon stole a digger from the construction site for a new shopping centre and drove it the nine miles home to the family’s cottage by the lake. He worked through the night executing his first performance piece, Home Sweet Home, the complete demolition of his childhood home. An exhibition based on the work, Home Sweet Home – Witness (2009), comprised a series of large-scale aluminium-printed photographs of the cottage before and after the demolition.
“The place where I grew up formed and moulded me,” he remarked in his speech at the exhibition launch. “But it was also a chain that bound me. Destroying it was a re-birth of sorts. It freed me.”
For a number of years after that, Fitzgibbon’s work investigated themes around the meaning of home, as well as broader issues of property ownership, economic freedom and social justice. On leaving Mayo, he moved to a bedsit in Rathmines for two years, before renting a series of studio apartments in Midleton, Athlone, Carlow town, Urlingford and Athy between 2007 and 2015.
During this period, he produced a number of long-scale works in which he documented various aspects of his daily life. These included Life – A Year (2009), a series of three hundred and sixty-five forms, which he filled in daily for a year. Each form documented the time he woke, the food and drink he consumed, the people he spoke to, the exercise he took, his emotional state at three-hourly intervals and the time and appearance of every bowel movement.
His self-portrait piece, On Waking (2013), had its only showing at the newly opened Brice Gallery in Dublin. The work constituted an astounding one thousand and ninety-five self-portrait photos which were displayed across all five gallery spaces, along with a live performance aspect. For three years, Fitzgibbon had taken a self-portrait photo (referred to as ‘selfies’ in popular culture) within seconds of waking up every morning. He believed that it was only possible to capture the true essence of a person in this way, before the impositions of the external world altered one’s psyche and essence. Fitzgibbon slept on a mattress in the corner of Gallery Two for the duration of the exhibition, allowing visitors to witness his waking and to experience his being in its most real and unadulterated form.
A new phase of Fitzgibbon’s career can be said to have started in 2016. In March of that year, the artist made a conscious decision to never again pay to keep a roof over his head and he neither rented nor owned property again. Instead, he travelled the country, relying entirely on the bounty of nature and the kindness of strangers for food and shelter.
“I was like a kind of an Irish nomad,” he said of the time. “I travelled the length and breadth of the country without a penny to my name. An artist needs to be free of worries about frivolous things like money. Without the traditional economic constraints foisted upon so many people, my creative energies flourished.”
In his 2019 video piece Nighty Night, Fitzgibbon explored the concept of home through documenting the places he had slept in the previous two years, including sofas, spare bedrooms, sheds, squats, derelict buildings, churches, park benches, Garda stations, and a range of vehicles. The work featured images and video recordings submitted by the public as part of his ‘Have you seen this man?’ social media campaign. The premiere of the video piece was interrupted by Gardaí who served a bench warrant on Fitzgibbon for trespass at the Mary Street branch of chain store Beds, Beds, Beds in March of that year. The artist had apparently hidden in the shop at closing time and was found sleeping in a top of the range king size bed when staff opened up the next morning. A public campaign to have the charges against him dropped resulted in a petition signed by 300,000 people and a daily protest by Fitzgibbon’s supporters at the entrance the shop until the owner relented and withdrew the charges.
In 2022 Fitzgibbon conceived and executed his performance piece, Dinner. In preparation for the piece, and to ensure he was duly engaged with the conceptual ethos behind the work, Fitzgibbon had not eaten for the previous three weeks. On August 17, he stood on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin, close to the Strawberry Beds, attempting to catch fish over the course of a twenty-four-hour live performance. The artist failed to catch anything except pondweed and rusty bicycles and was admitted to hospital the following day after collapsing at the end of the performance.
Nighty Night and Dinner are now considered seminal pieces in realising Fitzgibbon’s concept of Engaged Immersion. Nighty Night was his last formal exhibition as he had came to consider the display and sale of his art as crass commodification of a practice that was spiritually, physically, and psychologically essential to his very existence. He donated the little remaining money he had to donkey sanctuaries around the country, an animal that had been close to his heart since childhood.
By 2024, Fitzgibbon had ceased making individual works altogether and undertook what he considered his greatest piece and the culmination of his life’s work, Staying Alive (2024 - unfinished). Fitzgibbon moved onto the streets of Dublin for this piece. It was around this time that I met him, while doing a radio documentary on a homeless soup run in Dublin city. I found him a fascinating character and returned to sit and talk with him many times. He had a unique take on life, as well as art. He refused to use homeless hostels and other emergency accommodation, considering them anathema to his objectives in immersing himself in his practice. He would allow himself to accept gifts or money that was offered to him, but he had a strict rule to never actively seek them out. According to long-time friend and artist LUNGe, Fitzgibbon found the experience quite interesting at first.
“It was a novelty, wasn’t it?” LUNGe remarked in an Art Times interview after Fitzgibbon’s death. “Figuring out where the best shop doorways were, understanding the need for cardboard as insulation from the cold concrete and avoiding the gangs of boozed up young lads who would piss on you on their way home of a night.”
Tensions that had been bubbling under the surface for years between Fitzgibbon and Irish News art critic John Dillon developed into a public spat when, in a 2024 column, Dillon decried the artist as a complete fake.
“For the past ten years, Maurice Fitzgibbon has shown himself to be nothing more than a homeless bum, a scrounger and a layabout. To label his vagrant lifestyle as ‘art’ is an insult to those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of works of beauty that emotionally and intellectually challenge. He is an imposter, a spoofer and a complete fake”
Fitzgibbon retaliated in an interview with Dublin News recorded on a park bench he occasionally slept on in the Garden of Remembrance.
“Throughout history, artists who push boundaries have always been resisted and vilified,” Fitzgibbon said. “Our accomplishments are never appreciated fully in our lifetimes. Look at Vermeer and Van Gogh. No one bought their work until they were gone. Progressive change is always resisted by the establishment who see themselves as the gatekeepers of cultural taste.”
It was to be Fitzgibbon’s last interview.
As the numbers of homeless people increased, Fitzgibbon found day-to-day life increasingly difficult as more people competed for the same scant resources and spaces. Despite the hardships involved, Fitzgibbon observed that he had never felt so alive. His journal entry for April 2, 2025, reads: “I am no longer playing at art. My life is art. I am art.”
In the early hours of Jan 28th, 2026, during a period of extremely cold weather, Fitzgibbon was found dead in the alleyway behind a city centre McDonald’s. According to the member of staff who discovered his body, Fitzgibbon was propped up against a green recycling bin with a frozen shard of bile of the same colour hanging from his bottom lip.
Fitzgibbon’s funeral was held in the National Cathedral in Dublin and was attended by a plethora of artists, musician, TV personalities and influencers from across Ireland and the world, as well as the Tanaiste, the Minister for Arts and the President of Ireland, Denise Haltinberry-Mannix. The ceremony was streamed live on YouTube and to date has been viewed more than six million times. A resurgence of interest in the artists’ work has emerged since his death, with retrospectives planned at the Contemporary Centre for Arts in New York, London’s Konrad Gallery and the Performance Art Institute in Dublin.
More recently, Chief Executive of Dublin Municipal Council, Seamus Ó Flúileachán, has been working on a proposed scheme for aspiring performance artists in memory of, and inspired by, Fitzgibbon. Due to be voted on by the council after the summer recess, the scheme would allow homeless people to register as practising performance artists.
“Of course, participants would no longer be eligible for social welfare, and they would lose their place on the social housing list,” Ó Flúileachán told a Liffey News reporter. “But they can rest assured that the numerous charities operating soup-runs, drop-in centres and the like, will provide them with ample support. We estimate the council could make yearly savings in excess of €40 million from the implementation of such a scheme, while also significantly reducing the numbers of people registered as homeless in the city. Not everyone can paint,” he said, “but everyone has the potential to be a performance artist.”
And so, Fitzgibbon’s legacy will live on. Life is art is life.
Photo of Margaret Cahill
BIO: Margaret Cahill is a short story writer from Limerick, Ireland. Her fiction has featured in The Irish Independent, Frazzled Lit, The Argyle, Loft Books, Roi Fainéant, Bending Genres, Idle Ink, Bulb Culture Collective, Milk House, époque press, Ogham Stone, Honest Ulsterman, Silver Apples, Crannog and Galway Review. She was short-listed for Best Short Story at the Irish Book Awards 2024. She also dabbles in writing about music and art, with publications on HeadStuff.org and in Circa Arts Magazine.