Tina Whelan 2025
DATES
10 March to 19 April 2025
TIMES
10:00 to 16:30
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Tina Whelan
In Her Hands
10 March to 19 April 2025
In March 2025, I return to Uillinn, for phase 2 of research into and celebration of Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen Hutchins of Ballylickey, Co. Cork (1785–1815).
As a result of connections made in phase 1 in spring 2024, I have cast the hands of several of Ellen’s female relatives, in a particular hand gesture, as well as the hands of a young female Irish bryologist. This woman stands in Ellen’s place and informs a Bantry Bay, site specific installation, to be shown during a ‘special edition’ Hutchins Festival in August, marking the 210th anniversary of Ellen’s death in 1815.
During this residency, I will create an installation In her Hands for display in Bantry town during the Hutchins Festival 2025. The installation features the bryologist’s cast hands, who is almost the same age as Ellen was when she died at 29, and references the 17 new species of mosses, seaweeds, freshwater algae and liverworts Ellen found in the area around Bantry Bay in her short life ‘botanising’.
I aim to further this research, distilling where next to go in making new ‘Hutchins’ works, always with the objective of getting more intimate and more particular. Connecting with Ellen’s pioneering story continues my interest in epigenetic trauma inheritance and how this manifests in the female body. Despite, or perhaps because of circumstances, Ellen found her own voice, creating a remarkable legacy.
Casting the hands of three of Ellen’s great great grand nieces, the present-day line of women that come after Ellen and the stories they tell informs a new body of work. Exploring ‘Hutchins’ and the qualities of moss as a case study in hope and resilience is also new territory for me, a deep dive into the world of mosses, moss as a storyteller, and what we might learn from this low-life plant.
On the last Saturday of the residency Tina will give a papermaking demonstration with participants ‘couching’ their own sheets of paper. This event for which booking is required, will be followed by an open invitation to an artist’s talk to discuss the research, processes and material language of works created at Uillinn in Phase 2 and linking it to the Ellen Hutchins 10th festival in Bantry in August 2025. This year’s festival focuses on moss, with the festival team launching a Magnificent Moss project.
Tina Whelan is an Irish visual artist, researcher and story-teller. She studied at Belfast and Cork Colleges of Art and has a studio with the Backwater Artist Group, Cork City.
Her practice began with painting, performance and film. Later work merges paint, print and textiles with sculpture, which has led to her using a wide range of processes to form and express her transdisciplinary, multi-media art.
In 2024, she co-created Songs from a lost paradise, Laneway Gallery, Cork; a site specific installation at Spike Island, Deep Time in conjugation with Cork Harbour Festival and Backwater; and participated in Rua Red’s, Borders.