Educated in an Irish Catholic convent school, Fern O’Carolan came of age in an environment she describes as reminiscent of the 1960s, with traditional crafts like embroidery and baking used as tools of indoctrination, reinforcing ideals of disciplined, submissive femininity. Her work often incorporates vintage sewing patterns and stitched-together ephemera, subverting the crafts she was taught by the nuns. With a visual and material lexicon interrogating the breadth and nuances of femininity within popular, pornographic and consumer culture, O’Carolan explores imagery and material’s potential to both empower and exclude, as well as reinforce or disrupt systems of power and belief.

For her solo exhibition Guilt & Grace at NEVEN, O’Carolan presents a series of new wall-based fabric panels and bestial soft sculptures based on sewing patterns for children’s stuffed toys from the 1960s. The skin-tight fabric of party clothes is juxtaposed with the ribbon of a communion dress, stitched with metal grommets, studs, zippers and religious trinkets—a blood badge, a crucifix, a piece of devotional tapestry—, commodities of Catholic piety which evidence the transactional nature of spirituality where grace is marketed like a product, salvation boiled down to a bribe. A diamante transfer spells out ‘angel’, the original sinless entity, now a secularised pet name, appealingly sparkly. The stuffed animals tow an uneasy line, somewhere between innocence and possible corruption. Their titles of Latin origin, Velora and Vespera, respectively reference veiling/unveiling and the evening prayer in Catholic tradition known as Vespers.

O’Carolan’s process is one of recontextualisation. The pieces knowingly wink at traditional aesthetics of the Church—gilded icons, crimson drapery, a Virgin with eyes downcast—as charged with eroticism, submission, and the potential of transcendence as high street lingerie or a tight dress bought with the image of a certain ideal self in mind. Among the tension, there is a tender playfulness that allows shame and pleasure to coexist, transforming relics of the past into something at once profane, and possibly sacred again.