At 35, Martin O’Brien has already outlived his life expectancy. And in performances in which he attaches pegs to his testicles or smears himself with mucus, he brutally confronts his mortality
It’s not often you meet someone who self-identifies as a zombie. Are your pronouns he, she, they – or it, I ask. “Let’s go with ‘it’!” laughs Martin O’Brien, the most jovial zombie you could hope to meet. He (the pronoun he actually uses) is serving tea and Tunnock’s tea cakes on a hospital trolley in his studio in an LGBTQ+ art space in south London. On shelves are large fake shark’s heads (“my beautiful babies!”), and the wall boasts a picture of O’Brien naked, pretending to nail his penis to a table – a homage to his artistic forefather, the late Bob Flanagan (who did it for real, while singing If I Had a Hammer, in a work called Nailed).
A performance artist from Burnley, with a strong Lancashire accent, O’Brien calls himself a zombie because he has outlived his life expectancy as a person with cystic fibrosis. When he was born in 1987, people afflicted by his incurable condition, which clogs the lungs and other vital organs with mucus, were unlikely to live much past 30. “I’d been obsessed with the idea that I was going to die when I was 30, but when I got to 28, I realised that unless something went drastically wrong I was going to live for longer,” he says. “I started to think about a zombie being alive and dead at the same time and I thought, ‘I’m becoming a zombie.’ It felt like a playful, camp metaphor, but also a useful way of thinking about mortality and life-shortening illness.”
