powerful choice for representing Ireland’s painful (A)dressing Our Hidden Truths
legacies of institutional abuse. At once tough
at National Museum of Ireland, Dublin
and unyielding and delicate and fragile, glass can
From March 2019
also be dense and heavy whilst appearing to be
Laura McAtackney
weightless and light. Glass sculptures can faithfully represent the
Alison Lowry is a glass artist who works from her
mundane while innately changing the material
studio in Saintfield, Co Down. Her (A)dressing Our
presence of the subject. In this exhibition, Lowry’s
Hidden Truths brings together a selection of her
sculptures are both enchanting and uncanny,
works “inspired by such traumatic histories as the
pulling in the audience whilst also repelling them.
Tuam Mother and Baby Home, domestic violence
Lowry’s nuanced manipulation of her medium
and Ireland’s former Magdalene Laundry System”.
transforms the everyday and mundane into
The artistic use of Lowry’s primary medium –
magical, indeed haunting, representations of the
glass – is relatively rare in Ireland, but it is a
past legacies to which she is responding.
Alison Lowry, ‘Home Babies’, 2017. In (A)dressing Our Hidden Truths. National Museum of Ireland. Credit: Peter Moloney
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