Ciara O’Connor’s textile art is so assured one could be forgiven for thinking it has been her life’s work. However, it is only in the past few years that she has taken seriously to sewing and embroidery, and she seems surprised that her work is now being shown – alongside that by Dorothy Cross, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain and several others – in the group exhibition Following Threads at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.
A native of Dublin city, O’Connor originally studied painting and printmaking at college in Galway over twenty years ago. The experience was not a particularly happy one. “I ended up leaving after a few years,” she says. “I felt like, if I was to be a good artist, I needed to be a good painter, and I’m not. I didn’t realise it at the time, but in hindsight, I know I was suffering from depression.”
Thereafter, O’Connor travelled extensively, taking in Asia, South America and Australia. “At that point, I tried to come home to Ireland, but I just couldn’t settle. So I went to New York. I meant to stay for three or four weeks, but I just thought, you know what, if anywhere in the world can hold me right now, it’s New York. There’s every kind of music, and every kind of food. I loved it so much, I stayed for seven and a half years.”
Throughout her travels, O’Connor worked in hospitality, but kept doing creative things on the side. “I dabbled in millinery and photography. And while I was living in New York, I trained as a silversmith.”
On her return to Ireland, O’Connor lived in Dublin for a time. “My mum had passed away, and I became my father’s carer. Living at home, I needed something I could just pick up and do a little bit of work on, and put away again, and that’s what got me into sewing and embroidery. But it grabbed me in a way nothing else had. There was a sense of familiarity, an emotional connection; I remembered watching my grandmother’s hands as she was knitting, or my mom, mending a shirt or whatever.
“I went on Instagram and started seeing all these different artists working in textiles, people like Orly Cogan in New York and Billie Zangewa in South Africa, and that’s how I discovered free motion embroidery, which was something I’d never seen before. So Instagram opened up this new world of possibilities within the medium, and I just kept developing my skills until finally, after twenty years, I started calling myself an artist again. It was incredible to find my way back.“
It was also through Instagram that O’Connor was invited to stage her first solo exhibition, at Garter Lane in Waterford, after her work was spotted on social media. O’Connor’s exhibition, which ran for three months from August 2022, was called Brazen. She has described it as “a collection of stories about the theft of consent and the subsequent practice of emotional repair.”
Much of O’Connor’s work has been concerned with sexual politics. “I’m not an activist,” she says. “I don’t have the temperament for it. So this is my way of trying to start a conversation around things that can be difficult to talk about.”
One new piece at the Crawford, We Get What We Get And We Don’t Get Upset, “was definitely the most therapeutic thing I’ve ever made. It’s based on my experience of how, when I was a backpacker, I was assaulted by an individual who was in a position where he had access to young women. He was drugging and raping people.
“I started with this idea of ducks in a barrel, and that led on to how it had become a game to him. This carnival game. The figures are not based on specific women, they’re based on different women I met, but also parts of me, and parts of people I know. My father was dead by the time I made that work. The fabrics I used were all from his wardrobe, and my mum’s. It was a way of having them with me. The figures are stuffed with a combination of things, including a cushion from mom and dad’s house, and also some notes that I wrote on the sewing machine to my younger self. The stitches around the figures are done in a blanket stitch, in two colours that I associate with my mom, which comes from this desire to protect them.”
As a young woman travelling and working all over the world, O’Connor never imagined she would end up back in Ireland. “When I lived in New York, I thought I’d never leave,” she says. “But people change.”
Last year, she and her partner and their young son moved to her mother’s home town of Kenmare, Co Kerry. Her father came from Kilgarvan, just five miles away. “I’ve been coming to Kenmare on holidays my whole life,” she says. “And when we moved down, it immediately felt like I was home. I can honestly say I feel more at home here now than any other place I’ve lived.”
