#28

On women, girls and cruelty

I stand bewitched betwixt the wind and feel the cold against me, in all its stark, sharp bitterness, babe. Mine heart is hard, tight and strained, and I do long for solace.

Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma.

Over many months and weeks, dear reader, I’ve been working towards our second exhibition at Prayer Room, namely, A Mother’s Love. Cáit and Éiméar McClay: two artists I’ve adored for a long while now, and have been steadily following since their graduation from Edinburgh College of Art in 2020. Their shared practice, much of it 3D-rendered in a cotton-candy glaze, sullied in mud, mould and emerald moss, interrogates the pervasive nature of British Imperialism throughout 20th century Ireland, upheld by the binds of the Catholic Church, with a considered, baby-pink precision.

As of late, as you know angel, I’ve been thinking much about my Irish heritage, about belonging, family or lack thereof, and my latent relationship to faith in all its faults and fallacies. I’ve spoken before, babe, moons ago, of hiding my urge to love another girl – keeping that feeling wrapped up tight, deep down below. Praying it away for those prayers to dissipate into darkness.

It’s only now, some years post-Death, that I have once again scoured those marshes in search of God – that vague and indecipherable being – as a means of seeking comfort and peace, an answer to the “Why?” that I’ll forever ask. I wish, with longing, to comb through scripture and pick apart the meat, fat, bone, to feel something whole. I tend to forget that not everyone’s experience of faith is one in the same.

Cáit and Éiméar’s work beckoned to me, babe, in a profoundly teary-eyed way, for their practice explores – through film, sculpture and other ilk – loss, pain and anger at the hands of the Church, considerately finished with a pristine, synthetic grace. I am overcome by its distinct visual language, which delicately enmeshes the candy-coloured, plastic facets of Y2K girlhood, early-noughties video game aesthetics and gilded Catholic regalia. When Prayer Room was conceived in 2023, the twin sister duo were the first artists I’d ever wanted to reach out to.

Sissy Spacek in Carrie (1976) dir. Brian de Palma.

Moonlight filters through an open window, bathing the baby-pink bedroom in a wash of white and yellow light. The room is still, silent. Beyond the swathes of silken angels, gilded frames and fixings, crucifixes, wet wax candles weeping, butterflies beating, lies a hollow horror – true cruelty, unknown. Deep-down-below in pits of fine silt sits a shroud. A baby smothered, bundled, bound in sullied muslin. The enclave opens, and there are dozens.

A mother’s love for her baby (2022) imparts, with tender empathy, the abhorrent histories of the ‘Magdalene Laundries’, forty-one ‘mother and baby’ homes operated by the Catholic Church in Ireland for over two-hundred years. Through a series of laboured, painterly vignettes – in powder-pink acrylic and rusted wrought iron – Cáit and Éiméar McClay delicately illustrate the anguish experienced by young women and girls under the Catholic Church, the wounds of which still remain pertinent today.

What felt vital to me, in my first curatorial effort, was to pick apart the duo’s distinct aesthetic principles - that sense of in-game worldbuilding - which has only continued to flourish throughout each and every succeeding work. I wanted, with desperation, to construct an immersive and intimate space, that hybridised each scene embedded within the 16-minute film. I wished to emulate that sterility and stillness. I wished to present the duo’s work, ambitiously, in a way that has not been done before.

A Mother’s Love opens Friday, 5th July from 6 – 8pm at Prayer Room, as part of Digbeth First Friday. The exhibition continues, by appointment, until September’s end.

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