Cáit and Éiméar McClay
A Mother’s Love
5 July – 15 September 2024
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.
Leah Hickey Co-Director, Prayer Room
For more information, please contact prayer.room.gallery@gmail.com
