For the month of June, from the 4th to the 27th, an exhibition of local artist Katie Hassett’s work will run as a part of the festival. Her powerful exhibition “Ireland’s Forgotten Women” focuses on Irish society, personal history, religion, symbolism, and human experience. Her art is a contribution to art for change, in the reconciliation of those that are no longer with us.

Artist Statement

My practice is informed by personal history, religion, symbolism, and human experience. I use my work to confront maternal anguish within my heritage that remains silenced. I aim to give a voice of defiance in reflection of the psychological and physical maltreatment of Ireland’s so-called ‘fallen’ women under Catholic and patriarchal ruling. My research also looks to a global relation of mirrored experience, heavily impacted in the past by the broader agenda of Papal supremacy in relation to the rights to one’s choice of continuity to motherhood.

My work is individual to my experience as a child of a woman in the grief of another. There remained a silent despair lingering that one of us would always be missing, a reconnection would always be a struggle, correspondence would be slow and held in review by others and remorse would hang over her head in an attempt to rebuild her family. The impact of her hardship relayed anger in me and charged my work with emotion, to be a voice for her. I in turn create boldly with loud colour, telling a narrative through print and stained glass, utilising family photographs and sacred iconography to superimpose religious, political and personal imagery that aims to play on Ireland’s past heretical exploit. My work is a contribution to art for change, in the reconciliation of those that are no longer with us.

Presented by our young curators as part of the Lasta Festival 2024 – see full programme of events here.