‘A Mother’s Love’ Is the Exhibition Exploring Catholicism Through Y2k Aesthetics

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Currently at the Birmingham gallery and project space Prayer Room is A Mother’s Love, a show by twin sisters and artists Cáit and Éiméar McClay, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2020.

Through the artists’ shared, hyper-feminine aesthetic, which references video games, Y2K, and Catholic regalia, the show explores “the pervasive nature of British Imperialism throughout 20th century Ireland, upheld by the binds of the Catholic Church,” as gallerist Leah Hickey puts it.  

Catholic imagery – the pastel colours, soft faces and bleeding heart motifs – certainly feels aligned with the aesthetic of the teen girl bedroom in a strange way. Through work in mediums like film and sculpture, the artists consider loss, pain and anger as they have occurred at the hands of the church. When considering women’s relationships to all of these things, it’s impossible not to think about the Magdalene Laundries. 

These “mother and baby homes” operated in Ireland for over 200 years (the last one closed in 1996) and were run by the Catholic church. They were places of extreme cruelty – in the 1990s, the unmarked graves of 155 women were discovered in the grounds of a former laundry in Dublin – where “wayward” young women, pregnant and unmarried, were separated from their babies and forced to work. 

One work in the show, “A mother’s love for her baby” (2022), attempts to give a voice back  to the young women in the Laundries. Through a series of “painterly vignettes”, the McClays use a highly feminised visual language – that of teen girlhood – to speak to the experience of living in a mother and baby home, offering expression where there was none.

Showing until 15th September 2024, the show is a unique take on Catholicism and the emotional legacies of the church, through an often unexplored lens.