The Verbal Arts Centre is pleased to welcome the artist Louise Walsh who will be overseeing the installation of a major project in the Waterside Area from the Centre.

Artist's Statement:

I wanted to make a large-scale piece of work that responded to the magnitude of women’s contribution to Derry’s shirt industry. I used the image of the “tool” (the sewing machine) and “product” (the shirt) superimposing them in the landscape of the Waterside Roundabout at King Street. Part of the work also sits at the top of the hill behind the roundabout and continues down the adjacent grassy area that slopes to the Foyle beside Ebrington Barracks.

The sewing machine and shirt, as everyday symbols of the industry, are magnified to capture on an epic scale the sheer cumulative mass of industrial shirt production over the course of 150 years. The female skill and energy that produced such a volume of shirts are embodied in these symbols.

More personal stories, recorded with the help of local women who worked in the factories, will be readable when a person walks around the piece at the collar area of the shirt, making up a kind of label that doubles as a big commemorative plaque. I want real workers to input to the sculpture so that these women’s stories and experiences of day-to-day factory life are always present.

The sculpture essentially represents parts of a huge sewing machine working on a shirt, but it is not all shown, the viewer has to complete parts of the picture with their imagination. There are three distinct elements in this sculptural installation; the Wheel, the Needle Panel and the Shirt.

While the wheel part of the sewing machine is on the roundabout, a ‘thread’ crosses the road from it to meet the rest of the sculpture at the top of the slope behind. At the slope, sculptured grassy ground is made to look like the folds and collar of a shirt as it drapes down the hill towards the river below. A needle panel is sewing in the ‘label’ plaque that forms part of the collar.

The needle panel is made from laser cut steel; the latticework cutouts that form it are made to exactly correspond to a roll of cloth with the pieces of a shirt removed, (what is left from a cutting table of a factory, when the bundles have been given to the workers to sew).

The shirt’s collar also creates a viewing platform at the top of the slope, with views out over the Foyle, taking in the Guildhall and overlooking Ebrington Barracks. This is the heart of the piece - the collar label is where the commemoration of the women workers and their stories are inscribed.

The piece resonates on three distinct scales:
1. From a considerable distance (primarily the city-side, both riverbanks and surrounding hills).
2. Road users will actually drive through the piece, effecting changing views.
3. Walking around the piece, particularly in the collar area; layers of personal narratives and discoveries are revealed to the viewer. This contact delivers a range of information that highlights the worker’s stories. Many of these are testaments to friendships that were forged in the shirt factories and lasted for lifetimes, which I have heard so many times when talking to the women of Derry. It is my intention that these stories get told here.

The sculpture commands attention, both in terms of its scale, forms and pivotal location, deliberately announcing the extent of the women’s contribution to the City in a layering of relationships and meaning.