Alison Lowry’s ‘A New Skin’

Alison Lowry is an internationally-acclaimed artist who works mainly in glass.

She works from her studio in Saintfield, Co. Down. In 2009, she graduated from Ulster University with a first class Honours degree in Art and Design.

Alison Lowry is the only Irish artist to have been awarded a month-long residency (April 2014) at the Studio of the world-renowned Corning Museum of Glass, upstate New York.

Her exhibition Alison Lowry: (A)Dressing Our Hidden Truths: An artistic response to the Legacy of Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries runs at the National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts & History until the end of December 2020, and is based primarily on Alison Lowry’s work inspired by such traumatic histories as the Tuam Mother & Baby Home, domestic violence and Ireland’s former Magdalene Laundry system.

This work entitled 'A New Skin' is a response by Alison Lowry in collaboration with Úna Burke, to a survivor story of sexual assault. The exterior glass skin is still vulnerable, but just like glass, is also strong and supportive. The internal glass element, although broken, has been remade using the Japanese art form of Kintsugi (mending with gold) so whilst not hiding ‘flaws’ and breaks, makes the work more valuable and unique.

In this work, Alison Lowry is referencing ways one can permanently change one’s appearance: namely tattooing and self-harming. Some psychoanalysts believe that self-harming or tattooing can sometimes be a traumatised person’s way of creating a new skin, an ‘interface’ through which to deal with the world. It has also been noted by psychoanalysts that certain survivors of rape tattoo parts of their body in order to differentiate between the person that was ‘then’ (the victim) and ‘now’ (the survivor). The changing of one’s body is a way of owning the trauma, thereby reclaiming oneself.

This piece is all the more resonant in the wake of current debates in contemporary society pertaining to consent, as well as to the #MeToo movement.