A collaborative sharing of truths, laughter, experience and ideas.

Picking up the Pieces

...a three woman show about (im)perfection.

This work is concerned with a collective pressure to avoid failure, in all its guises. As women, mothers, artists and humans, we struggle to reach societal perfection. Despite our efforts we still fall short of the excellence we are expected to achieve. We have become objects

of criticism, corrected, fixed and improved, in other words; failing.

The media’s ongoing fixation on women’s appearances and corresponding ‘value’, holds a power over us. The unobtainable images and goals, illogical and tantalizing.

By focusing on the significance of the evening meal, the rituals, apparatus and symbolism surrounding it, we have adopted the china-dinner service as symbolic of this unattainable excellence. Applying the philosophy of Kintsugi, we transform the dinner service into unconventional and compelling objects with cracks and scars, in a practice of acceptance, a celebration and an embrace of the imperfect.

Breaking and re-making, we explore our collective angst at the ongoing and repetitive burden of domestic perfectionism. This becomes cathartic, representing a path to appreciating ‘mended’ things and a recognition of the power of the imperfect and the scar.

Working with installation, film and paint we have created the imperfect dinner table, symbol- ic of the thousands of breaks and remakes in all of our lives. An acceptance of ourselves and our own imperfections.

Darina Meagher, Cathy O’Reilly Hayes, Ann Marie Webb