This week we look at the work of Catherine Dowling who has three pieces in our current exhibition, ROOTS, a dialogue in textile and poetry. Catherine is a versatile artist, moving with ease between felting, embroidery, collage and painting. The poems Catherine chose as inspiration for her work are all explorations of relationships with nature, with grandparents and with living in and among nature’s abundance.

Jane Clarke’s poem “Nettles” brings Catherine back to a time when she was learning to ride a bicycle and visiting every clump of nettles along the roadside of her childhood home and she questions whether dock leaves really do cure nettle stings!

We thrashed ashplants 
through chest-high clumps, 

daring them to sting bare knees. 
By evening our legs were dotted 

with swellings like hives, 
rubbed dock leaf green.

Grandpa flattened the patch in minutes 
with the swishing sweep of his scythe ...
                                                                    
Nettles, Jane Clarke 

The second poem Catherine chose is called “Eggs” and describes the daily task of tending the hens and collecting eggs with a beloved grandmother. The poem captures the lovely moment when reaching into the nest boxes her hand wraps around a warm egg. There is something very grounded and comforting about that act. When Catherine thought about visually representing the poem, a repetitive image of eggs and hen feathers came to mind.

Having recently completed an online course with Fibre Arts Take Two which explored the medium of paper collage, it became the obvious medium for producing the representations for both poems. Using three rectangular, deep base canvasses as the substrate, Catherine worked with papers whose names are not familiar to most of us – Lokta and Himalaya paper and Wenzhou rice paper – and some more familiar such as embossed wallpaper. The wallpaper proved a very strong substrate from which to cut out leaf and egg shapes and kept its’ form through painting, gluing and drying and sealing. The Lokta paper wasn’t so tolerant of Catherine using a hairdryer to speed up the drying process! A felted and embroidered band was added to all three pieces introducing another texture to the work. The colours are subdued, faded like memory, the colour of fresh eggs perhaps?

Catherine’s third piece uses completely different mediums to respond to the poem ‘Among the Cows’. This beautiful poem tells us about a young girl getting much comfort from the gentleness of the cows who ‘let her lean into their warm bellies’ after her own mother died. Catherine grew up on a farm and cows, having always occupied the landscape of her life, drew her to recreate that childhood experience in the form of a child’s dress.

The bodice is made using wet felt technique and the skirt of tissue silk overlaid with cobweb felt, as light and ethereal as a child’s thoughts. Peeping through the gossamer layers are drawings on tissue of benign, placid cows.

The poem captures a young girl’s grief and an awareness that her feelings are mirrored in the sense of loss a calf experiences when it is weaned…

Her father knew where to find her;
she liked to stand among the cows ....

She would listen to the calves
calling for days when weaned,

until their voices, exhausted,
faded like mist from the fields.

Among the Cows, Jane Clarke

Thank you to Catherine for sharing her techniques and thoughts behind these works. Thanks also to Jane Clarke for her collaboration, her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, for allowing us to use her poetry, Kildare County Council Arts Office for grant funding and the OPW for offering us an exhibition space.

To see Catherine’s work visit Roots, a dialogue in textile and poetry at The Coach House Gallery, Dublin Castle, Monday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm (closed for lunch 1.15 – 1.45 pm).