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.

FERN O’CAROLAN (b. 1991, Dublin) is an Irish artist living and working in London whose work explores themes of femininity, innocence, sexuality, and their impasse with religious institutions, drawing from her experiences growing up in the Irish Catholic Church.

O’Carolan has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Slugtown, Newcastle (2023) and No Gallery, New York (2022) and has been included in group presentations at SWAB Art Fair, Barcelona (2024); Karma International, Zürich (2024); Pop Gun x Shipton, New York (2024); M.LeBlanc x Good Weather, Chicago (2024); PLOP, London (2023); Apartment 13 Gallery, Rhode Island (2023); The Bomb Factory, London (2023); Grove, London (2022); WASTE Gallery, London (2022); No Picture on The Walls, Manchester (2022); Ormside Projects, London (2021); SCREW Gallery, Leeds (2021); Karen Tronel Gallery, London (2019); Gallery 46 Whitechapel, London (2019), amongst others.
She graduated with an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London.

Guilt & Grace
OLIVIA ALLEN

To make the pleather that stretches through Fern O’Carolan’s practice, you start with polyester. Coat it with resin, let it dry, let it cure, let it weather. Repeat. With each application, the surface twists, contorts, strains – much like the process of leather-making, much like the subjective and seductive ability of memory.

O’Carolan repurposes experience in the same way: tanning, sanding, recontextualizing, breaking things down and rebuilding them into something sculptural. The past leaves traces – both physical and intangible. Stains seep into the surface – outlines of hands and nails, creases left by heavy handling, sweat absorbed by discarded scraps and discolouration that intensifies with time. Much like flesh, the materials hold onto disjointed memories of experience. The evidence of use, of touch, is obvious. Two-dimensional plains become structures, scraps of lives are sewn together: scraps of kitsch, scraps of faith. She salvages them from the fringes, stripping them of their original function and reanimating them as relics of something half-sacred, half-sinister.

There is tension in every inch of these works. Tight leather, ripped fabric, stretched and strained, threatening to tear, to burst. Seams pulled taut, life breathed into limp material. There is a sense of something barely contained, something pushing against its own boundaries, something always on the verge. Forms buckle under the weight of their history. Structures sag, slouch, slither. Nothing is rigid, nothing is absolute. They exist in flux, in the moment before rupture, or the moment after collapse.

O’Carolan collects things left behind, things that linger – on eBay, at the back of churches, in the dust of charity shop shelves or in the mind of a teenager. Old PVC trousers, torn upholstery, the ribbon from a communion dress long outgrown. These fragments are stitched into uneasy alliances: prayer cushions rub up against fetish wear, relics of innocence tangled with something more seedy. Holiness and hedonism blur at the edges, and the distinction between devotion and obsession starts to dissolve, mirrored in the uneasy marriage of materials.

Communion dresses lie against PVC, prayer cushions cradle metallic studs, and the gaze of idols are frozen in ecstasy. In these sculptural hybrids, worship and desire merge, their rituals indistinguishable – not in compulsion, but in construction. The tension is not in the fetish, but in its performance, in commodifying and adopting it as an aesthetic.

Catholicism drapes over these works like rigid leather – cloaking and unforgiving while worn into reluctant resignation. Ritual, reverence, guilt stitched into every seam. The iconography is unmistakable and the eroticism of Catholicism’s aesthetics pervades playful compositions. O’Carolan leans into this charged atmosphere, drawing out the tensions between sin and sanctity, worship and submission, flesh and spirit.

Sex and shame pervade O’Carolan’s creations, as something performed and borrowed. Nods to ecstasy, weeping Virgins, concealed openings are slipped on for size. The body is always present, even in its absence. Innocence and perversity go hand in hand. Metal and satin ribbon penetrate leather, studs and crystals burst through supple, stretched skin. Violent abrasion in submissive material. The sacred and the profane collapse into one another, faith and artifice made indistinguishable and worn as a costume in response to the self. Where there is worship, there is control. Where there is control, there is surrender. The body bows, contorts and is reshaped by unseen forces, whether divine or human.

Sexuality and theatre are woven into every surface, every crevice. O’Carolan’s work does not simply present sexuality; it examines how it is performed, mediated, and self-consciously styled. Desire is packaged, tried on and worn with uncertainty. Here, sexuality is about negotiation - an attempt to reclaim or construct the self through secret, suburban rituals. The materials themselves speak of it: PVC, metal, leather, ribbon, diamante. Objects that suggest desire and discipline, control and release. Restraint is everywhere – belts cinch, straps tighten, seams stretch to their breaking point. Obsession, repetition, devotion - repeat. To worship something is to submit to it, to surrender to the ritual of it, whether it be faith or desire.

Everything is about sex, and sex is about power – or at least that’s how the saying goes. But power is slippery, shifting hands between the submissive and the dominant, between control and surrender. Desire bends it, twists it, makes it strange. Sex is funny. Sex is perverse and strange. It pokes, prods, protrudes. It makes itself known in unexpected places, slinking into the folds of upholstery, the buttons of a prayer cushion, the slashed seams of PVC trousers. O’Carolan sees the humour in the absurdity. A wink to the audience, a quiet provocation.

To desire something is to give it power. To repress something is to make it monstrous. Slumped creatures, relics of childhood twisted into something sinister – memories we can’t revisit without discomfort, tainted by experience and the suggestion of exploitation. Collars restrict and constrain.

Among the tension, there is something tender. The compositions are playful. O’Carolan pokes fun at the tension between guilt and desire, faith and fetish and lets it stretch and strain without needing to explain itself.

Plaster Magazine