Cáit and Éiméar McClay in conversation with Prayer Room from 7pm
The exhibition ‘A Mother’s Love’ will be open from 6–8pm
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.
For more information, please contact prayer.room.gallery@gmail.com