The Emergence of a Domestic Avant-garde in Contemporary Irish Art: the Paradoxical House/home

Introduction Although the domestic has been critically observed in relation to British artists in the 1990s, it has not been considered cross-culturally in terms of Irish artists. Considering many female Irish artists were coming of age in the 1990s, as part of a newly enlightened media-aware generation, conscious of feminist ideas and changing attitudes towards women both in Ireland and internationally, this paper argues that consequently, the domestic, as a subject-matter or material culture, became the vanguard for a ‘domestic’ artistic movement to develop. By establishing a domestic aesthetic, artists sought to highlight and explore the multiple signifiers entrenched in domestic space and iconography, by subverting traditionally held assumptions of the role of women within the home and thereby, it is argued, established a challenging, innovative art discourse. It is proffered that this phenomenon materialised in Irish art from the late 1980s onwards, partly as a reaction to these changes and as a reaction to women’s traditional association to the home, which was particularly contradictory and contentious in the Republic of Ireland. The paper suggests a ‘turn to the domestic’ for Irish artists in some instances pre-dated their British contemporaries and traces this evolution, with special regard to the work of Irish artist Alice Maher and her response to the philosophical writings of Gaston Bachelard. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the emergence of this domestic art movement in relation to contemporary Irish artists, within the wider context of societal change, and cross-cultural exchange.