Female experience in the spotlight at Cork exhibition 

The home can be a loving sanctuary, but throughout history, it has been used as gilded cage. Historically, women were expected to find fulfillment solely within the home, often without choice.

The female experience is under the spotlight at an exhibition entitled ‘City Of Ladies’ at the Laneway Gallery on Shandon Street, with work by artists Sarah Jayne Booth and Alison O’Shea.

Self-trained artist, Alison O’Shea, who is showing images of women at the Laneway Gallery, is originally from Limerick and based in Cork. She studied history and sociology at UCC.

“I had considered going to art college but it didn’t seem viable. So I got a liberal arts degree – equally unviable!”

Alison stopped her practice of constantly painting for a few years. She got back into it while in recovery from a serious illness.

Six years ago, a virus attacked her central nervous system and her brain stem, specifically.

“I was paralysed from the neck down with limited use of my forearms. It wasn’t paralysis in the usual sense.

“It was degenerative, spreading up from my feet. I was in hospital for about three and a half months and was an outpatient after that.

“While I was recovering, I had a stroke because of the pressure on my brain. It damaged an optic nerve which has left me with permanent double vision. My optic nerve in my left eye is not fully connected so my eyeball moves a little in the socket.”

Because of the nerve damage that Alison experienced, she has a slight tremor in her hands. It all influences her art.

“It literally and figuratively influences how I view the world. My painting ‘Double Filtered’ in particular is a blend of both internal and external senses. There’s the larger critique of Instagram filters and how women ‘should’ appear, and the internal grieving and accepting that I’m not who I once was.”

At the gallery, Alison is showing a painting entitled ‘The Beast I Am’.

“It’s a Medusa-based painting. The story of Medusa has been revisited a lot in recent years and how she wasn’t actually the monster (depicted in mythology, complete with snakes in her hair and an ability to turn men to stone).”

Because of her double vision and tremors in her hands, it can take Alison a long time to complete a painting.

“I’ve had to learn to accept that sometimes, things will go wrong in my work. Sometimes, the work doesn’t come out the way I imagined it.”

But Alison is making her disability a feature of her art.

“One of my ultimate goals is trying to actually paint what I literally see. If I can show people what I see, that is going to be much more impactful than a verbal description of my art.”

Sarah Jayne is showing a collection of around three dozen porcelain figurines, representing women from past generations, as well as an installation of miniature buildings.

“My installation was inspired by Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, a visionary feminist text imagining a symbolic city that honours women. That ideal stands in stark contrast to Ireland’s real ‘architecture of containment’ – the Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby Homes and other institutions that confined and erased women deemed undesirable. I wanted to bring these ideas together in a visual language, turning anger, memory and hope into something tangible.

“Women’s experiences are central to my practice. I work from a feminist perspective, not to exclude other stories, but because women’s lives have been silenced, controlled and shaped by patriarchal power in ways that demand attention.

“These stories also open into wider conversations about justice, memory, culture and resistance.”

Sarah Jayne’s porcelain figures “represent idealised femininity; delicate, graceful, decorative. I sourced them from charity shops and friends. They once sat locked in cabinets, silent and admired. Now, reassembled, they symbolise the way women were placed on pedestals, yet confined, beautiful but breakable.”

Enforced domesticity can be a trap, says Sarah Jayne.

“The home can be a loving sanctuary, but throughout history, it has been used as a gilded cage. Historically, women were expected to find fulfilment solely within the home, often without choice. I’ve worked in a domestic violence context, so I’m deeply aware of the darker side of the domestic space, where control and harm can hide behind the curtains. The issue isn’t domesticity itself, but systemic containment and the lack of agency.”

The miniature buildings in the installation “resemble institutional structures/homes, a miniature plaster city surrounded by red liquid which seeps out like blood or washing water. It speaks to hidden grief; lost children, stolen lives, the violence of moral judgment. It’s a visual metaphor for the pain society tried to hide but which inevitably seeps out.

“There are artistic responses to the Magdalene laundries – works like Alison Lowry’s ‘A(D)ressing Our Hidden Truths’ and Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’. These are powerful responses.

“Artistic engagement is growing as Ireland continues to process this painful legacy and the silence that surrounded this history for so long.

“These stories of containment, silence and resistance will keep returning in my future work.”

Sarah Jayne studied fine art at the Crawford and later completed a postgraduate degree there. She says that living anywhere as an artist has its challenges but she is grateful for the creative community in her native Cork and for the support from Cork City Council arts office. She is based at Sample Studios.

Sarah Jayne continues to be involved with OSS Cork Domestic Violence Information Resource Centre.

“That continues to shape me. It has grounded my art in real experience and reminded me that silence isn’t just metaphorical- it is lived.”

‘City of Ladies’ continues at the Laneway Gallery on Shandon Street until April 19.