Alisha O’Donoghue

Stranded Memory reflects on the unrecorded women and children whose labour built the Irish textile industry. Their untold stories, stranded in their time.

Using collected strands of human hair stitched into fabric, this work explores the relationship between the human body, labour, and material production. These women and children gave of themselves physically and were still rendered invisible. Each hair strand marks an unarchived life, an unacknowledged hand. The initials and ages of the women and children who worked these factories, recovered through research, are embroidered in hair at the top of the stockings, reclaiming the space once reserved for the initials of affluent clientele in vaulted circles of society.

Smyth & Co. Hosiery Factory in Balbriggan operated for over 200 years, from the 1740s to the 1980s, producing stockings so celebrated worldwide that the town became known as Stockingopolis, and their product simply as Balbriggans. Through their labour they clothed the wealthiest in society, supplying nations and royalty. Yet, the women and children who made these sought after garments were never named or recorded in their factory's history, save for the census.

Such exploitation is not new, nor is it fading. It stretches back to the birth of the Industrial Revolution and grows only more urgent with time. Stranded Memory gathers the untold stories of the exploited garment worker, from Balbriggan’s factories to the production lines that exist today, and honours their untold lives.