The project ‘Lost lace’ is a collaborative project between the visual artist Miriam McConnon and the poet Jessica Traynor. Miriam McConnon’s outdoor installation ‘Lost Lace’ is made up of approximately ten thousand white roses made by the artist from individual white handkerchiefs. The artist will place the roses around one of the fountains at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens. The handkerchief roses will form a delicate pattern of traditional Irish Lace. Each Handkerchief rose symbolizes a life lost in Ireland and Northern Ireland due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Each single handkerchief rose in this installation references the small cloths or ‘clooties’ that were hung traditionally on trees near the site of holy wells in Pagan Ireland. The handkerchief was believed to drive illness away by absorbing it. The artist has chosen to place them in a floral lace pattern hinting at the concept of the man-made object imitating nature in an attempt to find resolve.
The single rose is a symbol of devotion. Here this devotion becomes collective, signifying the national and personal loss. This installation urges the public to not lose sight of the individual life, the single rose. In this installation McConnon emphasises the solitary path of individual grief in unison with the national and collective loss, urging the people of Ireland to unite in grief and in the commemoration of the lives lost to Covid 19.
The poet Jessica Traynor was commissioned to write a series of four poems, taking as a guiding principle the ambition to honour those things we have lost during the covid 19 pandemic and the words and messages submitted on the project’s website by those who have lost friends and relatives to covid 19 in Ireland.