Artist: Gráinne Mulligan Title: 'How do you Sew the Night? (After Micheal Longley)'1 Oil on Canvas
How do you Sew the Night?(After Micheal Longley)', Oil on Canvas, is an exploration of intergenerational memory, ritual and the maternal, explored through an examination of gender craft in the context of contemporary art. My grandmother's quilt, which she crocheted over 100 years ago in Kerry, acts as a repository of the memory of the hands that made it and the bodies it covered in life and death.
When I first touched my grandmother's crocheted quilt, I was conscious of how it held her presence, how each individual, intricate stitch retained her imprint, perhaps even her DNA and I was also conscious of the durational process taken to make the quilt. Both my grandmother and my mother worked with thread and made crochet, lace, tapestry and dressmaking.
My grandmother passed when I was very young and the quilt was placed on her body in the ritual of the waking a loved one, the bed signifying the site of conception, birth and death. That ritual was performed by my sisters and I when my mother passed. Being given the gift of my grandmother's quilt last year, by my sister, prompted a body of work in 2024/2025, of which this is one painting.
In my work, I sometimes use 'Ekphrasis', a rhetorical device, where one art form informs another, such as poetry influencing a title of my work. In this case, it is the poetry of Michael Longley which influenced the title. 'How do you Sew the Night? (After Micheal Longley)', taken from his poem 'The Design'.
Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design
Made up of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?
I had the pleasure of briefly meeting with the poet, Michael Longley in 2022 at the funeral service for Brendan Keneally, having been introduced by my brother, Neil, a musician, who was a friend of Michaels. However, in that brief time, I was struck by his warmth, his wonderful humour and his generosity of spirit. When he sadly passed in January 2025, I came across his poem 'The Design' in his book of poetry entitled 'Ash Keys'. The final line 'How do you sew the night? seemed so appropriate for this painting that I was working on at the time and indeed seemed prescient in the context of his own passing.
He had written the poem in 2007 after seeing Shaker quilts being made in New England. Subsequently, I read that he had dedicated the poem to Maya Angelou, the poet and civil rights activist, who died in 2014.
Contextually, influential artists exploring memory, an absent presence and the maternal through painting, cloth and thread are Alison Watt, Allyson Keehan and Chiharu Shiota, while Jennifer Trouton explores these themes subversively through painting, archival material and gender craft.
In the digital era of ephemera and immediate stimuli, painting is a durational process, similar to writing or other art forms, which like crochet, uniquely holds one's presence and memory.
Bio: Gráinne Mulligan
Gráinne Mulligan is a research based visual artist, having graduated from NCAD with an MFA Fine Art, Painting Degree in 2024 and a BA in 2021. Following her undergraduate degree, she did a two-month work and research Erasmus in the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and spent 5 months studying for her MFA in Rome.
She has received recognition as an emerging artist, having been awarded the 2025 Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown Emerging Artist Bursary and the Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust Award in 2021. 'Her painting 'Her Presence still Lingers,1,' was selected for the 2025 RHA Annual Exhibition. 'How do you sew the Night? (After Michael Longley) has been selected for RUA 2025 Annual Exhibition.
'Bodyscape, 2025' and 'Lightscape, 2021' have been purchased by the Office of Public Works for the Irish State Collection and her works are also in commercial and private collections. She completed a residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in June 2025, and has been awarded one in Creative Spark, Dundalk in 2025. She will be having a solo show in DIVA, Dun Laoghaire in 2026.
Her current work explores memory, absence and the maternal through an examination of gender craft in the context of contemporary art. Her grandmother's quilt, crocheted over 100 years ago, acts as a repository of the memory of the hands that made it and the bodies it covered in life and death.
Her work is materialised in oil paintings, drawings, print and thread sculptures, and in the case of the latter, it is used as a visual metaphor for maternal, mitochondrial DNA. This work builds on her 2024 MFA graduate work 'Tracing Thread Through Time' and her 2021 undergraduate show which explored an 'Absent Presence' during the Covid epidemic.
Website: https://grainnemulligan.com/
Instagram Accounthttps://instagram.com/grainnemulligan_