Unfamiliar Landscape  

Lorraine Parker

Vaults

27 August - 19 September 2026

Artist talk 12 September, 12pm

“The female body and its value in both domestic and institutional spaces are at the core of my practice. The work for this exhibition looks at the female body as it collides with institutional policies and procedures. The sculptures reflect the traumatised birth with its intrusive procedures resulting in the loss of bodily autonomy. Women’s bodies are a landscape, a site of contention and control. It is within maternity institutions where interventions, policy, procedure and tolerances dominate and leave women outside of decisions made about their bodies. My figures express the rawness of birth, the altered body as new unfamiliar landscape. A body left to deal with the consequences of ‘too much too soon’ (non-evidence-based interventions) and ‘too little too late’ (below evidence-based standards, or care withheld or unavailable until too late to help). The pages of the handmade Artist Book emulate stretched, cut, torn bodies held together with stitch: one side is the pencil line of the scar and the underside reveals the layered, messy and unfiltered inner tale.  The paper is whitewashed, tactile and fragile, reflecting the need for a careful touch.” Lorraine Parker, 2026. 

Lorraine Parker is an emerging visual artist based in Cork. In 2021 she graduated from MTU Crawford College of Art & Design (MTU CCAD) with a First Class BA (Hons) in Contemporary Applied Art, Glass, Ceramics and Textiles. Upon graduating she was recipient of the MTU CCAD Textile Residency Award 2021-2022, the Cork Arts Society Student of the Year Award (Group exhibition at Lavit Gallery), and the Cork Textiles Network Graduate Award. In 2022 she was awarded the Arts Council Agility Award. In 2023 she received the Benchspace Rising Sparks eighteen-month Residency Award.