Caged

By Philippa Maguire

This piece was made in response to the visit to the National Museum of Ireland. We looked at the romance and reality exhibition “ Many artists portrayed the people of the countryside and the islands as heroic, innocent, and timeless, making their way of life seem pure and appealing” I was struck by this and related this to the object of God in a Bottle. The old Irish way of Whiskey and religion . I looked at the history and understood that like today, the immigrants did not get what they expected when they travelled to a new land . Many Irish were drawn into slavery. We have seen a lot of slavery in Ireland in the sex trade, where abuse is often the norm.

I put a statue of our lady in a bag which is reflected on to an image of a cage with a crumpled bed. In modern day Ireland what do we care?