Since graduating with first class honours in Textile Design, Ciara Connolly has explored themes of heritage, biodiversity and place. In sharing her process, Connolly believes she gives the viewer an opportunity to imagine the evolution of the work and intervene in its creation. Often sharing her early experiments and sketches, she describes the viewing of her work as the ‘finishing action’ of her art. Her work as an educator is evident and enriches our experience of looking at art.

Speaking in pattern, Connolly translates us from the seeing to the seen. In her practice, painting is a pattern making tool, as part of which she creates 2D and 3D textiles, weaving together a pattern of dashes and marks that one day become stitches. Over the years, these preparatory pieces have emerged as works in themselves. They carry the struggle that she imagines all artists experience, between what is experienced and what is recorded.

Places matter: her work often recalls her childhood in County Waterford. With her, we inhabit landscapes from where she views the homes of her parents, grandparents and great grandparents. A partially remembered past unravels in famine roads, mass paths, fords and old lines of road through the mountains. The dense textures of memory press down upon her work. Working with repurposed fabrics — scraps of upholstery and pieces of old linen, connected with silk and cotton threads — she imagines the loose lines and deep textures of an old and familiar landscape that contains multitudes. The place itself continually empties out, seeming to escape the edges of the image: her work of repair continues.

Throughout history, women have gathered together to sew: to prepare, to celebrate and to mourn. New stitches were often devised to mark milestones as women recorded their histories across generations. Crafted fabrics that were once worn, laundered and mended are elevated to artwork that celebrates women, their bodies and their service to other women.

Functions and meanings blur and overlap as utilitarian textiles express symbolic ideas. Embroidery functions much like the act of writing, making meanings with flax and cotton and offering testimony to the craft person's ability to give birth to forms that tell stories in thread. Made with traditional skills including blanket stitches, smocking, french knots, chain and satin stitching, Connolly’s images speak using woman-words — moons, shells, landscape, vessels — and reference craft processes of plating metal with gold or silver. With shapes drawn from tableware, plates, cups and bowls — universal symbols of care — her work carries reminders of the balance of nature and the people who shape the land.