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Marina Abramovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1946 . Her work investigates the relationship between the performer and the audience, enabling participation by observers to uncover fresh notions of identity, and considers endurance as an art form.   Abramovic is considered an art world ion and a performance art pioneer. She has pushed both herself and her audience by inviting audience member to interact with her through  performance pieces. She focussed on ‘confronting pain, blood and physical limits of the body’ - all of which are likely to lead to tears.   One of her most famous pieces was ‘The Artist is Present’ which was exhibited in 2010 in the New York Museum of Modern Art. To understand it’s magnitude as art – she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition in all of the museum’s main galleries since opening in 1768. This piece was 736 hours and 30 minutes long – in which Marina sat at a table opposite her audience member, in silence. The audience ...

  Weeping Statues The phenomena of statues weeping tears, sometimes of blood has been believed from ancient times. Plato (AD429-347) and Aristotle (AD384-322) both stated that Dedalus made statues that walked and had to be tethered at night to prevent them walking away!    Moving to more modern times, in 1643 in Rottweil in Germany at least 42 citizens witnessed Our Lady of the Turning Eyes shedding tears, changing complexion, speaking and moving her head.   In August 1953 an image of the immaculate heart of Mary, belonging to Angelo and Antonina Lannuso of Syracuse shed tears for 4 days.   The sculpture was dried and closely examined but no trickery was found and   laboratory tests showed the tears to have the alkalinity and composition of human tears.   In October 1954 Pope Pius XII acknowledged the miracle of Mary of Syracuse. Since the weeping Mary of Syracuse there have been many claims of weeping or moving statues but most have been sho...

Why have we evolved to shed emotional tears when other animals haven't? Animals do produce tears but for different reasons than humans. They tend to shed tears for practical purposes like eye lubrication and protection, or for other biological and defence reasons. For example, "crocodile tears".  This describes an insincere display of emotion such as crying fake tears of sadness.  The phrase comes from an ancient belief that crocodiles cried while eating their prey and the expression exists in many modern languages, introduced via Latin.  While crocodiles do have tear ducts, they actually weep to lubricate their eyes when they dry up out of the water. Humans, like other animas, shred tears to protect and clean our eyes too, but we also cry when we have intense feelings such as grief, joy, frustration and pain.  Animals don't have the same response to these emotions, instead they rely on alternative methods of communication such as distress calls, posture displays, sc...

  Big Boys Don’t Cry   Women cry, on average, five times more than men and for twice as long each time. Would it surprise you to find that this is not a biologically defined gender difference, but rather, a social construct? Probably not! While it’s true that hormones play a part in the production of tears, testosterone inhibits crying and prolactin promotes tears, cultural expectations are at the heart of the differences in the frequency of men’s and women’s tears. Boys are conditioned to not cry from a very young age. Little boys are told that big boys don’t cry, that they need to be brave, that it’s girly (and by inference, weak) to cry, and as teenagers, to ‘man up’ if they allow their tears to well up. Boys and men are expected to contain their emotions and it is seen as unmanly to shed tears in public. This wasn’t always the case. The Bible is full of men weeping openly, all the way from Genesis to Revelations. The Greek heroes of Homer’s Iliad were famous ...

  Let’s set the scene: There is a room full of adults, everyone is socialising and chatting. An argument begins among some men, testosterone kicks in and a fight begins. Suddenly a female bursts into tears. This causes the fight to subdue. But why does this make it stop? Is it because people are empathic and generally nice? But then what do those words even mean? What actually makes people be these things? Was it actually just them looking at her and feeling ‘sorry’ for her that made them calm down? Do we have as much control over our behaviour as we think? Let’s delve in. To start we need to know a little bit more about that liquid stuff that falls from our eyes - whether we are watching our friend get married, our pet just died, we sat for too long beside a smoky fire or just decided to cut a friggin onion. All of these things cause the same liquid to fall from our eyeballs in each scenario, right? …   Righttttt …...? Well not really. Those things that we ...

        During Elizabeth I’s long reign her ambition was to anglicise Ireland.  By the 1590s she had been more or less successful with the exception of Ulster but Ulster appeared to be safe enough, cut off as it was from the rest of the country by a natural barrier of mountains and lakes.  So long as the Northern chiefs were quiet it was safe enough to leave them alone. In Munster Elizabeth made a concentrated effort to anglicise the province.  Fighting dragged on for three years and almost all Munster was laid waste.  Although Elizabeth won this conflict it had the effect of uniting the native Irish and the Old English settlers, the descendants of the Normans, in their common faith of Catholicism.  This strengthened the government’s belief that to be Roman Catholic was synonymous with treason.  A land settlement in Monaghan had undermined traditional life there and the establishment of military garri...

  High Flying Reindeer Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! …  Now, come on! Reindeer can’t fly, can they? A quick Google search for ‘reindeer flying’ brought up two suggested questions: How do reindeer fly? and Are reindeer real? I did wonder why people who were old enough to type into a search engine bar would ask these questions, but then, I realised that I had just done it too. Most of the results were, unsurprisingly, related to Santa’s reindeer, but it turns out that the 1823 poem ‘The Night before Christmas’ with authorship claimed by Clement C Moore in 1837, isn’t the beginning of the flying reindeer story. There are beliefs and legends surrounding reindeer taking flight dating back to prehistory. In the central and eastern regions of Mongolia, and into parts of Northern Europe and Asia, carved Reindeer Stones stand up to 15 feet high. The earliest of these unusual stones is thought to be between 5000 and 7000 years old with most dating to the Late Bronze age...