Public Lecture: ICA activism and craftivism around rural electrification
AHRC Women’s Grassroots Activism Network
Public Lecture: ICA activism and craftivism around rural electrification
Tuesday 18 June 2024, 7-8pm (online)
Kitchen Power and ‘A Light from Heaven’: Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) activism and craftivism around rural electrification.
This seminar will look at the role that ICA activists played in the Irish rural electrification programme in the 1950s and 1960s, working alongside the ESB and other voluntary organisations to bring electricity to the homes and farms of rural Ireland. It will showcase the Kitchen Power exhibition in the National Museum of Ireland as an example of how archives, material objects and oral histories can be used to tell a story about how life changed in rural Ireland, in this case with the energy transition to widespread use of electricity. It will particularly look at the textile art project run with the NMI’s knitting and crochet circle and Castlebar ICA, creating new art work as a creative way to tell their stories of living through rural electrification.
About the Speaker
Dr Sorcha O’Brien teaches design history and theory in IADT and TU Dublin, and curated the AHRC-funded Kitchen Power exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life in 2019-20, as part of a research project at Kingston University, London. She is the author of Powering the Nation: Images of the Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
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Image Credit:
‘A Light from Heaven’ by Noreen Durken, created as part of the Kitchen Power textile art project, 2018-19. Photograph by Sorcha O’Brien.