For fashion designer, writer and artist Joanne Hynes, the creative process has never been confined to a single discipline. Her practice moves intuitively between the material and the written. In Oh Mother I Called for You, her first project at MoLI, Hynes uses writing to grasp at the loss of her daughter, stillborn in 2013, and the continuation of life.
Formed around extracts from her memoir in progress, I Will Never Not Be Where You Are, this installation extends text into physical space through symbolic associations. Writing itself is an act of making for Hynes: a means of searching, resisting and remaining present with what cannot easily be expressed.
Printed passages of writing are cut apart with scissors, sometimes into individual sentences, then reformed and recontextualised alongside collected objects and artefacts. The text is never presented in full; instead, we catch it in glimpses and extracts, piecing together impressions of an experience. This way of making echoes the rhythms of Hynes's own writing, which moves between moments of candid reflection and total immersion, before everything shifts again.
Oh Mother I Called for You extends the act of making beyond the written page, building a space that sits between a moving past and a forming present. This small room in MoLI is partially covered in a discontinued Sanderson floral textile which once covered the walls, curtains and furniture of Hynes's childhood home. Here, forty years later, it becomes part of a story in which loss, grief and remembering are encountered and re-encountered as continuing actions through which we might live.
The exhibition itself will continue to change throughout its five-month duration, as Hynes returns to this room in MoLI as a place of making, working with the writing, materials and objects gathered there to explore and reinterpret associations. Over this time, pieces of the cloth covering the walls will be cut away and paired with extracts from the memoir, serving as reminders or relics of the exhibition that visitors can take away with them.
The exhibition will run from 20 November 2026 – 4 April 2027. Opening night is Thursday 19 November from 5pm, and entry is by ticket only.
Oh Mother I Called for You explores experiences of stillbirth, loss and grief, and includes writing that some visitors may find distressing.
Presented in association with Féileacáin, a not-for-profit organisation supporting anyone affected by the death of a baby during or after pregnancy. feileacain.ie
Commissioned by MoLI with funding from the Arts Council. MoLI’s digital programme is supported by Ebow, The Digital Agency.
