Home Industries meet for a needlework shift during Spring Preview, an open event for the exhibition To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions at Kunstverein Aughrim in 2024. Photograph by Freddie Greenall courtesy of Kunstverein Aughrim.
Home Industries meet for a needlework shift during Spring Preview, an open event for the exhibition To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions at Kunstverein Aughrim in 2024. Photograph by Freddie Greenall courtesy of Kunstverein Aughrim.
Keepsake I (needleworker Catherine Ryan)
Home Industries 2024
Croatian souvenir tablecloth threads on Irish souvenir handkerchief
400mm x 400mm
Photograph courtesy the artist.
Keepsake II (needleworker Jo Perdue)
Home Industries 2024
Croatian souvenir tablecloth threads on Irish souvenir handkerchief
400mm x 400mm
Photograph courtesy the artist.
Home Industries meet for a needlework shift during Spring Preview, an open event for the exhibition To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions, Kunstverein Aughrim, 2024. Photograph by Freddie Greenall courtesy of Kunstverein Aughrim.
Home Industries meet for a needlework shift during Spring Preview, an open event for the exhibition To Impermanent Collections and Scattered Acquisitions at Kunstverein Aughrim in 2024. Photograph by Freddie Greenall courtesy of Kunstverein Aughrim.
Keepsake III (needleworker Orla Callaghan)
Home Industries 2024
Croatian souvenir tablecloth threads on Irish souvenir handkerchief
400mm x 400mm
Installed at Ethnographic Museum Zagreb, 2024 on custom-made frame. Photograph by Ana Vuko courtesy of CIMO.
As part of my 2024 collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, a small team of local needleworkers was enlisted to form a ‘workforce’ to assist in the development of work for We are collecting today for tomorrow, a solo exhibition at Ethnographic Museum Zagreb following my 2023 Briefing on Soft Arts (BoSA) residency with CIMO in Zagreb. Working under the banner of Home Industries, the needleworkers met weekly around a table in my exhibition at Kunstverein Aughrim in paid embroidery shifts during the show’s run.
Inspired by the reflections of a museum textiles curator grappling with having sourced items of her collection from a flea market – an object’s story being integral to a museum’s preservation process – on the first day of my BoSA residency, I walked out to Hrelić flea market in search of remnants of Zagreb’s razed garment factories. Picking and pressing wildflowers on my route to Hrelić sought to commemorate the journey of the textile relics from once prosperous production lines. Their sharp decline and ensuing bankruptcy had followed privatisation in the break-up of Yugoslavia. Factories were gutted almost overnight, and little was preserved of a booming textiles industry, least of all in Croatia’s State Archives. Combining the shapes of shadows cast by the exterior ornamentation of this building with the outlines of the pressed wildflowers, a set of four handkerchiefs were among the ‘products’ I designed for Home Industries to embroider. Using the unpicked threads of souvenir tablecloths from Croatia, they embroidered souvenir linen handkerchiefs bought in Irish tourist shops. The Keepsake series is at once homage to former communities of socialist labour and museum collections of fading skills, whilst also raising questions about what is preserved and promoted of a nation’s identity.
Home Industries are Orla Callaghan, Barbara Callaghan, Caroline Dillon, Shane Malone-Murphy, Jo Perdue, Catherine Ryan and Sue Wardell in collaboration with Marielle MacLeman and Kunstverein Aughrim. The project was part of a yearlong collaboration with Kunstverein Aughrim, made possible with the support of The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.