Silent Parlours Lucy Sheridan & Eleanor McCaughey

Silent Parlours is the third presentation of works from artists Eleanor McCaughey and Lucy Sheridan.

We make and mold, visceral, hand made works from shared and lived experiences with infertility, miscarriage, endometriosis and premature ovarian failure. Our current work has developed out of a fundamental compulsion to ‘make’ through the loss and grief of remembered futures.

We are interested in the history and politics that surround the female identity and the body. The focus for the work for this exhibition is on the representation of women in literature at the end of the 18th Century in the light of contemporary female ideologies, exploring and comparing the internalisation of dominant cultural beliefs regarding expected roles for girls and women in Ireland today.

Central to the exhibition is an exploration of the association between femininity and the domestic space. We consider inherited traditions and material objects as carriers of cultural memory and gendered expectation. Domestic objects often passed intergenerationally from grandmother to mother to daughter, such as tea sets, vases, candlesticks, cupboards, cabinets, textiles, and religious or devotional ephemera, are examined as symbolic and functional signifiers of women’s historical positioning within the home.

This inquiry is further complicated by the contemporary context of Ireland’s housing crisis. The instability of domestic space raises important questions about inheritance, belonging, and continuity. How are these domestic objects and traditions negotiated when homes are temporary, shared, or inaccessible? What does it mean to preserve or relinquish heirlooms when there is no stable space in which to situate them? Through these questions, Lucy Sheridan interrogates the tension between inherited domestic identities and the precarity of contemporary living conditions in Ireland, highlighting the evolving relationship between women, material culture, and notions of private space and home today.

As part of her installation for this exhibition, Lucy Sheridan has commissioned artist Emma Sheridan to create a textile work. This piece will serve as the setting for Sheridan’s ceramic works, signifying the intergenerational exchange of domestic objects and support through family.

The installation of Eleanor McCaughey's work at Linenhall responds directly to the recent and ongoing evictions of artists from studio spaces across Ireland, this is frequently linked to redevelopment and the conversion of creative sites into commercial hotels. These displacements foreground urgent questions concerning the value given to artistic labour, cultural production, and the spaces that sustain them.

Artists' studios are more than a site of production, they are critical spaces of experimentation and reflection. It is where, as artists, both Lucy and Eleanor engage materially and conceptually with their practices, through processes of cutting, assembling, melting, binding, sculpting, and painting, working through ideas in ways that are iterative, tactile, and embodied. The studio offers a private space for open reflection on life, past, and future. It is where ideas and concepts come together. In this way, it acts as a sort of Silent Parlor.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Eleanor McCaughey studied at TU, Dublin. Selected exhibitions include ‘When you open your door to a mountain’ Solo 2025, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. A sea change into something rich and strange, 2024, RHA, Whispers of rhythm balance on my hands, Draíocht, 2024, Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, The Complex, 2023, Bones in the attic, Hugh Lane Gallery,2022, Super Market Art Fair, Stockholm, 2021, Vignettes, Richard Heller Gallery, LA USA, 2019 and Sytonic State, Tulca, Galway, 2018

Eleanor McCaughey is a recipient of the Fingal County Council Bursary 2019-24, Arts Council Ireland Bursary Award 2019-2023, Culture Ireland 23, Fingal CoCo, RHA Residency 2022, The Temple Bar Project Award 2021, and the Next Generation Award 2018. Her work is represented at the OPW, Arts Council Ireland, and private collections internationally. Eleanor is represented by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery.

Lucy Sheridan is a visual artist based in Kildare with a studio in Talbot Studios, Dublin. Recent exhibits include; Behind the Curtain for Artworks 2024, VISUAL Carlow; Somewhat Damaged, Red Couch Gallery, 2024; Matters of Table (group), Gorey School of Art, 2023; Portals (group), Luan Gallery, Athlone, 2023; Pay no Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain, Complex Gallery, 2022; Crucible (group), Thameside gallery, London, 2022; Oddly Accurate Things, 126 Galway, 2019. Lucy participated in Peripheries POST, Gorey School of Art in 2022/2023 and MASS Correspondence Course 2020/2022. Lucy graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design in 2006

Lucy Sheridan is a recipient of the Artworks Prize at Visual Carlow 2024, Kildare County Council Arts Act award 2022 - 2024, Arts Council Agility Awards 2022 & 2023, and the Dún Laoghaire‑Rathdown Emerging Artist Award 2022. Her residencies include the Leitrim Sculpture Centre 2024, Cill Rialaig 2014, 2017, 2021 & 2022, and SIM in Reykjavik 2010. Sheridan's work is held in OPW, as well as in private collections in Dublin, Hong Kong, and London and paintings have been published in Poetry Ireland 2022.