Powerful new body of work to be exhibited at Mayo gallery
SILENT Parlours, a presentation from co-collaborative artists Eleanor McCaughey and Lucy Sheridan, will be launched at the Linenhall Gallery in Castlebar this evening (Friday).
A duo that each make and mold visceral, hand-made works from shared and lived experiences with infertility, miscarriage, endometriosis and premature ovarian failure, this exhibition developed from a fundamental compulsion to ‘make’, through the loss and grief of remembered futures.
McCaughey and Sheridan, both interested in the history and politics surrounding the female identity and body, focused on women in literature at the end of the 18th century - reflecting contemporary female ideologies, exploring and comparing the internalisation of dominant cultural beliefs, in terms of expected roles for girls and women in Ireland today.
Central to Silent Parlours is the association between femininity and the domestic space. Inherited traditions and material objects are considered as carriers of cultural memory and gendered expectation. Domestic objects often passed intergenerationally from grandmother to mother to daughter, such as tea sets, vases, candlesticks, textiles, and religious or devotional ephemera, are examined as symbolic and functional signifiers of women’s historical positioning in the home.
The contemporary context of Ireland’s housing crisis further complicates, with the instability of domestic space raising questions about inheritance, belonging, and continuity. How are these objects and traditions negotiated when homes are temporary, shared, or inaccessible? Why preserve or relinquish heirlooms when there is no stable space to situate them?
Lucy Sheridan interrogates the tension between inherited domestic identities and the precarity of contemporary living conditions in Ireland, highlighting the evolving relationship between women, material culture, and notions of private space. She commissioned artist Emma Sheridan to create a textile work, to serve as the setting for her ceramic pieces, to signify the intergenerational exchange of domestic objects and support through family.
Eleanor McCaughey’s installation responds directly to the recent and ongoing evictions of artists from studio spaces across Ireland, frequently linked to the conversion of creative sites into commercial hotels. These displacements foreground urgent questions concerning the value given to artistic labour, cultural production, and the spaces sustaining them.
Artists' studios are more than a production site; they are critical spaces of experimentation and reflection. A space where artists engage materially and conceptually with their practices, through processes of cutting, assembling, melting, binding, sculpting, and painting, working through ideas in ways that are iterative, tactile, and embodied. The studio offers a private space for open reflection on life, past, and future. It is where ideas and concepts come together. In this way, it acts as a sort of…. Silent Parlor.
The exhibition runs in the Linenhall Gallery until Saturday, February 28.