From Subversion to Celebration: The Emergence of a domestic avant garde in contemporary Irish Art

Abstract

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.1 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.