The Subversive Stitch

Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Her practice incorporates Porcelain Sculpture, Soft Sculpture, Embroidery Sculpture and Drawing, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity. Burke's work explores precarity in the social realm, power relations in the political arena and post-conflict histories relative to Northern Ireland. Her work creates a conceptual bridge between antiquity and the contemporary, mining art historical tropes of representation and display. Mediated through craft - based processes re-configured in a fine art context, her approach destabilises conventions around traditional approaches to making by using unexpected juxtapositions of materials, processes and images with a desire that bends towards the surreal.

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Rebecca Devaney is a Paris-based textile artist, researcher and teacher, and the founder of the acclaimed Textile Tours of Paris. Her work as an artist is inspired by literature, poetry and dress history that describe and illustrate the female experience of social constructs of beauty and femininity. Rebecca explores these themes and develops narratives through the motif of Pandora dolls, using haute couture embroidery techniques to embroider and embellish textile sculptures. She has a BA in Art, Craft and Design Education (2006) and an MFA in Textile Art and Artefact (2015) from NCAD and graduated as a professional Haute Couture embroiderer from the prestigious École Lesage in Paris (2018). Rebecca established Textile Tours of Paris which explores the rich heritage of luxury textiles and haute couture fashion woven through the fabric of Paris, via seasonal walking tours of the haberdasheries and flea markets of Paris. She launched Samplers of Seduction, a collection of beautiful embroidery kits inspired by 18th century French patterns and designs hidden in the libraries and museums of Paris.

Rebecca created three tambour embroidery ‘samplers’ while studying at École Lesage and applied these techniques to embroider verses from the Keening for Art O’Laoighaire translated by Doireann Ní Ghríofa in A Ghost in the Throat. A Response to Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven is a series of Pandora Dolls that explore the relationship between WB Yeats and Maud Gonne through The Trope of Goddess and The Feminine Ideal, concluding with the suggestion of Acceptance.

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Rachel Fallon uses sculpture, drawing, photography and performance techniques to deal with themes of protection and defence in domestic realms, and address women’s relationships to society.

Recent works: Jelen Vagyok / I Am Present, a collaborative performance-based piece relating to queer and female representation in public spaces, commissioned by Budapest Galeria and Kiscelli Múzeum, Hungary which has been performed in Budapest and Manhattan and The Map with Alice Maher as part of ‘The Magdalene Series’ at Rua Red, most recently shown at IAC, New York.

Her work is held in public collections including IMMA, the Arts Council of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. She lives and works in Dublin.

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Catherine Fay is a visual artist and costume designer in theatre, opera and dance. Her visual art practice is rooted in print, textiles and costume and she is conceptually interested in the in-between. The presence of non-presence. How by unpicking and reassembling a material object that contains an absence can presence be revealed. From its inception the objects’ materials have been chronicling a connection with place, time and matter. This chronicle of existence permeates the atmosphere shedding impressions that may be possible to record and illustrate.

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I was born in 1979 in the former Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, then part of the Soviet Union. According to communist ideology, labor was heavily advocated as a central value, and women in magazines were portrayed as hardworking comrades of Soviet society. Beyond their labor roles, women were also taught traditional handcrafts to become skilled artisans. Soviet Woman, an Estonian women's magazine of the era, propagated femininity according to communist ideology, where gender roles were constructed according to its values. My current painting practice is very much concerned with the position of the self in contemporary society, simultaneously harking back to my ancestral heritage and geopolitical origins.

My paintings are created from dried layers of acrylic or household paint, manipulated at different drying stages by scraping, folding, cutting, drawing into, and building up. In several large-scale works, the infrastructure of paint becomes its surface, pushing the material to its limits. The paint forms sensual, curved lines—thin, fragile, and seductive as treacle, yet repulsive like a wound, mimicking the texture and fragility of human skin, creating a visceral bond between material and body. Some works reclaim traditional handcraft techniques, such as embroidery, basket weaving, and knitting. The interaction of embroidered and non-embroidered works emphasizes the dialogue between the intricacy of handcraft and the rawness of paint.

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Abigail O’Brien born in 1957, lives and works in Ireland.

Abigail O’Brien’s work fuses fine art practices with traditional forms of object making and employs many media including photography, sculpture, video, sound and hand-made embroidered objects. O’Brien’s work explores themes such as ritual, rites of passage and the domestic realm. These rituals are both an anchor and a noose and are a way of navigating the complexities of life.

She has just completed her treatise on The Cardinal Virtues – Fortitude (2005), Temperance (2009), Prudence (2017) and Justice (2021).

Previously, O’Brien worked on her series The Seven Sacraments (1995–2004), inspired by the work of Nicolas Poussin. The sacraments act as a catalyst and are interpreted through secular ideas and discourses. The full suite of installations were shown in Haus Der Kunst, Munich in 2004 and the RHA Gallery, Dublin in 2005. O’Brien’s work features in private and public collections including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Caldic Collection, Rotterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; The Kunstmuseum, The Hague; and Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City.

She received her MA in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 1998. She was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by the National University of Ireland in 2019.

O’Brien was elected as President of the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 2018, the first female president of the RHA since its foundation 200 years ago. Her term has been extended until 2028. She is a Member of the Boards of the National Gallery of Ireland and The Highlands Gallery, Drogheda.

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