(A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths is an exhibition housed at the National Museum of Ireland-Decorative Arts and History, installed in a warren of small black rooms, and shows the crimes perpetrated by the Catholic church against women and children. Created by Northern Irish artist Alison Lowry, the exhibition’s primary medium is “pâte’ de verre,” (“paste of glass”) a labor-intensive 19th century form of glass casting. The beauty and aesthetic of the exhibition amplified the horror that it depicts, the slavery and abuse done by the church towards women and children, as Hyperallergic detailed:
The first cases illustrate how women were shorn of their hair, their possessions and even their name; they were given new, Biblical names by the nuns.
The first object one encounters upon entering the exhibition is a life-sized, old-fashioned work apron fabricated of unfired pâte de verre over fabric. The beads of glass are textural and thick, giving the apron a slight fuzziness — like an old-time photograph that is slightly out of focus. The apron is both hard and soft, an interesting visual metaphor for the labor of laundry.
A brief background: In 2012 a mass grave holding the bodies of 796 children was discovered in Tuam, Ireland on the former site of St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home, an institution run by the Bon Secours Sisters order of nuns from 1921 to 1965. Mother and baby homes (a tragically ironic name) were homes for unwed mothers and their children, many of whom were forcibly taken from their mothers for adoption, and the women forced into manual labor to “pay” for their care. The hygienic and medical conditions were abysmal; as a result, many of the babies, children, and mothers died.
The Magdalene Laundries, a Catholic institution run by nuns where unwanted women and children worked in forced servitude benefitting the church as a lucrative laundry facility. It is estimated that upwards of 30,000 women and teenage girls lived in slavery in these institutions from roughly 1760 until 1996, when the last workhouse was closed.
image credit: Peter Moloney via Hyperallergic