Celtic Studies Commons^™

Personal Design, Political Design, Dark Design, Catherine Harper

Arts and Design

The western-feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch, 1970) emerged in the late 1960s, connecting women’s varied experiences of, for example, reproductive autonomy, pay inequality, childcare/household labour, and domestic violence, with social and political issues. These include social justice, civil rights, abortion access, gay and women’s liberation, the dismantling of systemic racism and structural oppression.

As an Irish, feminist, auto-ethnographic artist-designer-writer-academic, my lived experience of three decades of political violence and social repression in Northern Ireland (1967-98) and the different but no less complex cultures of the UK (1996-2022) and Egypt (1922-), is informed by deliberatively, intentionally designed activism for …

The Stained & Bloody Cloths Of Ireland: A Material Culture View Of Irish Shame, Oppression, Morality And Repression., Catherine Harper Ph.D

Arts and Design

The Stained and Bloody Cloths of Ireland presents a textiles and material culture view of Irish shame, oppression, morality and repression.

Ireland – north and south – has sustained significant change in the last 100 years, since partial independence from Britain, accelerating at the end of the twentieth century with legalisation of contraception, divorce, gay marriage, the end – or at least reduction – of the ‘Troubles’ in the North, and freedom to choose abortion and reproductive autonomy.

In parallel to this, many instances of societal and ecclesiastical abuse, sexual repression, superstition and cruelty, have come to light through a …

A Material Culture View Of Irish Shame, Oppression, Morality And Repression., Catherine Harper Ph.D

Arts and Design

Ireland – North and South – has sustained significant change in the last 100 years, accelerating at the end of the twentieth century with legalisation of contraception, divorce, gay marriage, the end – or at least reduction – of the ‘Troubles’ in the North, and freedom to choose abortion and reproductive autonomy.

In parallel to this, many instances of societal and ecclesiastical abuse, sexual repression, superstition and cruelty, have come to light through a series of scandals including the use of unmarried mothers as unpaid labour in laundries throughout Ireland until the mid-1990s, the deaths of women in hidden childbirth …