​My work investigates craft technologies, specifically basketry, cordage making, spinning, and textile production as forms of gendered knowledge-making. I examine how these practices functioned as essential technologies of survival and social organization, and how their historical marginalization reflects broader systems of gendered labor, power, and erasure. By resituating these craft methods within a contemporary fine art context, my work seeks to generate new understandings of ritual making, ecological knowledge, conservation, and the invisible structures that have shaped domestic and communal life. 

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Focusing on early material culture (specifically within pre-colonized Ireland), my research centers on weaving, cordage making, spinning, and basketry as domestic skills predominantly performed by women and developed within the home. Although foundational to early societies, these practices are largely absent from dominant historical narratives, particularly as craft histories shift toward mass production and capitalist frameworks that privilege male labor and industrial authorship for capitalist gain. Through large-scale woven works, soft sculpture, and performance, I investigate how women’s labor in prehistory contributed to social hierarchies, domestic economies, and early forms of social organization, despite its historical invisibility. 

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By recovering and reenacting practices of slow making within a contemporary fine art framework, my work exposes the complexity, intelligence, and embodied knowledge embedded in women’s labor that is rarely spoken. These reenactments are not acts of nostalgia, but critical inquiries that position craft as a living research methodology capable of revealing how gendered labor shaped domestic, ecological, and communal systems. My practice emphasizes making as a form of thinking, where materials, repetition, and bodily engagement generate insight that cannot be accessed through text-based research alone. 

 

My research is structured around three primary objectives. To analyze historical craft practices as technologies of knowledge and examine how materials such as rushes, grasses, flax, and wool encode relationships between land, household labor, and societal foundations. Through material experimentation, I investigate how craft functions as an ecological and social system rather than a purely utilitarian practice. 

 

To explore how these methods shaped gendered identities and social structures I study how domestic craft practices produced forms of agency, resistance, and community, contributing to gendered resilience within oppressive historical structures. This includes examining how repetitive labor, skill transmission, and ritualized making supported collective survival. 

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To extend historical research into contemporary sculptural and performative practice, using large scale hand weaving, installation, and performance, I create new works that reinterpret historical craft forms and test their relevance to contemporary conversations surrounding gender, labor, environment, and embodied memory. 

 

My research integrates studio-based experimentation with historical, archival, and contextual inquiry through material reconstruction and studio experimentation to recreate weaving styles and basketry forms using historically referenced and locally sourced materials, including rushes, willow, flax, and handmade cordage to bring these ways of making back to the personal. Doing this allows the making to be frontal and centered in the narratives of historical information rather than erased. These objects are produced at a large scale to test the limits of domestic forms by stretching, distorting, and unweaving them. Throughout this process, I document material behaviors and bodily movements, building an archive that connects physical labor to cultural meaning. 

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This research culminates in a body of sculptural and performative work, a written periodical, and extensive documentation that emphasizes historical craft processes as legitimate and necessary forms of research. My primary contribution lies in repositioning domestic craft traditions as dynamic intellectual systems rather than static artifacts. Through practice-based inquiry, I demonstrate how making operates as a research methodology capable of uncovering social, environmental, and political histories embedded within material processes. 

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By bridging anthropology, craft studies, and contemporary art, my work argues that labor itself functions as a primary mode of investigation. The integration of studio practice and research enables my project to engage both academic and public audiences, contributing to broader conversations about gender, care, labor, and cultural identity. Ultimately, this research challenges dominant historical narratives by asserting craft as a critical framework for understanding the origins and persistence of gendered systems of oppression.

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