Doll making is a radical practice, an ancient tradition that goes back to the hands who fashioned the Woman of Hohle Fels, the Woman of Willendorf and all those twig and leaf, skin and bone dolls, made with prayer and intention, petition and gratitude that were blessed by the rain and scattered by the wind.
Dolls making is a magical practice, for they are born from liminal spaces. As we make the doll, the doll works on us, and we meet between the worlds.
I started painting with the aim to create abstract landscapes. Each time I crated a landscape a figure would emerge, so I began with a landscape and welcomed the figure - and so most of my paintings feature the Ancestral Mothers. The paintings are rooted in a deep sense of place, the stories from under our feet and the deities of place and a building of that relationship.
These prayer beads are based on the concept of the Celtic Wheel of the Year. Each of the 8 sections represents a holy day and honours the Ancestral Mothers. After the pendant follows three beads - these are 3 silve step beads and are an invitation to to slowly approach your practice with three slow steps into sacred space.
From the summers when we were wee and travelled over to Galway to visit my Gran, I’ve always been captivated by the portal tombs we visited. It was many years later until I visited Newgrange and then started exploring these great monuments in wool. Some portal tombs are fitted with LED lights, to honour the Winter Solstice.
It was a thought to create a standing stone that got me into felting, which lead to standing stone circles, dolmen, portal tombs and little wooden shrines.All places to honour deities of place, ancestors and our beloved dead.
I love the versatility of weaving, especially when with using embroidery hoops and the meditative circular motions. Most of all I love that even if I am creating art on a non traditional loom, I still enter the flow, the same flow that millions of women entered when they wove, through countless generations.
Circular ‘Hearth’ altar peices - honouring the Old Antlered One, Bear, Sheela na Gig
Black and White pen drawings
Felt wall hangings - Selkie, the Caillach, Crone
