Fota House; Responding to the Collection Exhibition

Responding to the Collection is an invitation from Fota House to the Mór Artists Collective to respond to an element of its historical collection. The exhibition ran from June 9th-22nd 2025.

Fota House is a Regency period house owned by Irish Heritage Trust which is home to Ireland’s first archive of historic wallpapers, donated by architect and conservationist John O’Connell. Within its vast archives of Victorian era wallpapers it has a huge range of visually fascinating samples from imported Japanese leather embossed papers to Irish produced block prints.

In responding to its collection I, along with the other members of the Mór Artists Collective were given access to Fota's collection. In compiling my response I considered the social context in which these papers would have been used. In the houses and cottages of Ireland “as early as the 1880’s” the annual wallpapering of the rooms in the house became a common task, sometimes undertaken by the family together. Women who would have been involved with aesthetic decisions about the patterns and colours of the wallpapers which would have given them some agency around the visual life and culture of their domestic settings/homes. Wallpapering can also be seen as a protective act/gesture. The wallpaper absorbed soot and household toxins that had accumulated in the house. It sealed drafts and “was seen as contributing to a clean and healthy living space.”

My painting entitled Wallpapering, pictures a woman from the Victorian era involved in the the task of hanging wallpaper. She presses wallpaper upon the wall, with love and attention and resolution. The sense of ceremony and decisiveness. Echoes of motifs from Fota's collection dance around her feet.