O’Brien is best known for performance art actions in which he uses endurance and un-simulated injury to explore his experience of living with cystic fibrosis, a chronic genetic illness. A key proponent of disability art in the U.K., O’Brien uses performance art as well as installation and video to challenge common representations of illness and disability and examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease. His performances include vignettes that employ percussive therapeutic techniques designed to treat the symptoms of cystic fibrosis ; or invented techniques such as cutting the shape of lungs onto the skin of his chest. For example, Mucus Factory of 2011 is structured by a cycle of actions through which O’Brien performs versions of therapeutic interventions required to maintain his health and slow the progress of cystic fibrosis. His works also tend to borrow the styling, actions, and paraphernalia of sadomasochistic practices, including genital piercing, autoerotic asphyxiation, or mummification. His use of imagery derive from BDSM is often in direct dialogue with the work of the late Bob Flanagan, a pioneering artist who similarly used pain and endurance to explore his experiences as a person with cystic fibrosis in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the first version of his major work Mucus Factory in 2011, O’Brien has collaborated frequently with Flanagan’s former collaborator, the artistSheree Rose, including most recently on the durational performance and video installationThe Viewing. According to an interview for BBC Radio, having lived beyond his life expectancy twice, first beyond the age of five and then beyond 30, O’Brien identifies as a zombie; this has informed his recent works, including his comical uses of zombie imagery in works such as If It Were The Apocalypse I’d Eat You To Stay Alive, as well as prompting him to spend his 30th birthday in an abandoned morgue. In a conversation with the artist Tim Etchells, O’Brien stated:
A lot of my work is a gathering of performances in which I work with the materiality of my disease. So the mucus I produce becomes a material to use and I work with ideas of duration and physical endurance and infliction of pain on my body. I talk about the politics of sickness and at the momenta lot of my work is around the figure of a zombie. I’m doing work that thinks about how I might use the zombie as a metaphor for thinking about sickness and what it means to be sick.
