KATHLEEN — Leah Hilliard

Billboard image

The image is a digitalisation of a felt applique work. A dark green antique typewriter sits on a solid blue background. The machine stitches are visible. The high touch points are picked out in hot pink, such as the keyboard and a handle that has been add to the right-hand side of the typewriter.You can see a yellow cog on the inside of the machinery. There is a blank page loaded ready to be typed on. To the right of the image there is a yellow cup and saucer]

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KATHLEEN

Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, 2022

A bespoke textile work, realised in a billboard on Railway Street, Navan, with a QR code linking to a video spoken word piece, celebrating the remarkable story of Kathleen Napoli McKenna (1897-1988). Kathleen McKenna was witness and contributor to one of the most significant times in Ireland’s history. In her work producing the Irish Bulletin for the Propaganda Department of the first Dáil, she showed bravery, resourcefulness and dexterity. During the War of Independence, the London treaty negotiations, and the Civil War, she had confidential and volatile information at her fingertips.

Digitisation of the original textile work draws attention to the evidence of the human hand; KATHLEEN is an individual act of making, just as the Irish Bulletin was. So much of the labour and success of campaigning involves intense and repetitive tasks that not only reinforce the bonds of the cause but also foster the comradeship needed to sustain commitment. I was particularly struck by the references to the skill and dexterity of Kathleen McKenna in laying out type. The back of a piece of embroidery can be as revealing as the front. It symbolises the way in which history often doesn’t give the full story of a campaign.

“The Irish Bulletin was about to carry to the world authentic news of our country.

With an air of self-satisfaction [Arthur] Griffith said I was to be its godmother. During the twenty terror-filled months in which, on point of honour, its publication never once failed,

I guarded my godchild with jealous affection.” Kathleen McKenna

First shown on Railway Street, Solstice Arts Centre, 28 April - 19 May 2022. I was awarded a Kathleen McKenna Award in 2021. As part of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023, Solstice Arts Centre and Meath County Council Cultural Services are commemorating Irish republican activist and journalist Kathleen Napoli McKenna, born in Oldcastle, County Meath, with the Kathleen McKenna Award.