Dance of Life Textile

The ‘Dance of Life’ textile was created between 1992 and 1993 by the West Tallaght Women’s Textile Collective – Bernie McArdle, Christine Mason, Catherine Walker, Lilian Dalton, Marion Kilby, Donna Kilby, June O’Connor, Promilla Shaw, Jilloo Rajan, and Wendy Cowan.

In the mid to late 90’s, West Tallaght, an outer suburb of Dublin was characterised by  newly built public housing estates and a scarcity of amenities. The textile project began in a women’s center run by the Catholic Church and finished in a domestic space after the women’s group was unceremoniously ‘thrown out’ of the centre which demanded subservience to stories told about us. Our ‘revolutionary’ work centred on talking about what mattered to our lives and drawing these concerns into the textile.  The depth of our conversations and drawings became a powerful political statement.

This period coincided with a time of significant political change in Ireland, as famously stated by Mary Robinson, the seventh President of Ireland (1990), that “the women of Ireland, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system. “The ‘Dance of Life’ textile, was researched and stitched by women of both Irish and South Asian heritage, within the intimate storied space of cups of tea, childminding, and the exchange of textile traditions.

The project involved researching Mughal artwork from Dublin’s Chester Beatty Library, alongside fifth and sixth-century gold work and early illuminated manuscripts from the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin. Our attention to diverse  traditions resulted in a personal/political textile that rethreaded Irish politics from a monocultural to a pluralistic society. Every revolution has a kitchen table at its heart.

In 1993, the ‘Dance of Life’ textile was acquired by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) as part of its permanent collection.

This art project enabled a process where cross-cultural understanding occured through the sharing of the crafting of textiles and embroidery. The rich interweaving of stories so skilfully led by Wendy as a socially engaged arts practitioner was seminal in opening up the museum as a site for exchange and connection between different cultural groups in Ireland.

Helen O’Donoghue, IMMA Curator

EXHIBITIONS

1997 – Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum and Art Gallery, London. ‘Shamiana Mughal Tent’ exhibition.

2000 – 2001 –  Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). ‘Shamiana – Mughal Textiles’ exhibition in partnership with the Chester Betty Library.