In 2018 Artist in Residence Róisín de Buitléar collaborated with Pavee Point as part of the Residency programme at the National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts & History. Titled the Beady Pocket Project, the aim of the project is to extend and build on the Museum’s links with the Traveller Community through this collaboration with Pavee Point. 

Róisín worked collaboratively with local Traveller women from the community during November 2018. The collaboration is a participative project where learning is two-way, shared experience by expanding on the representation of Traveller Culture. The project also involved an intergenerational element to reignite lost Traveller culture from older to younger generations. Róisín de Buitléar provided opportunities for an exchange and sharing of both Traveller and settled people cultures that might lead to better understandings, new thinking, and new perspectives. This project focuses on promoting Traveller culture and identity by promoting understanding and respect. The National Museum of Ireland and the artist welcomed Travellers to the Museum to share their culture with women from the settled community and wider public. By exploring shared ideologies on culture, domestic craft, and the language of the hand through this hands on workshop, new relationships developed between the museum and all the participants.
 

Following meetings with women from the Traveller Community, facilitated by Pavee Point, we decided that the Beady Pocket would be the central theme for this collaborative and participative project.

These beautiful and useful garments were the focus of workshops where women from the Traveller community generously shared their heritage, traditions and craft with younger Travellers and settled women. In this Museum space, over the series of workshops, there was a meaningful and genuine exchange of knowledge and experiences which was very significant. The Beady Pockets also sparked rich connections with the Museum’s clothing and jewellery collections, and in the power of objects to tell our stories. There was a resonance too in that in 2018 we were commemorating the centenary of some Irish women getting the vote. For those women campaigning 100 years ago, pockets were symbolic and important in the struggle for equal rights, and this felt significant in context of the struggle for Traveller’s rights and equality of opportunity in contemporary Irish society.

This was an important project for the Museum, in terms of our ongoing work to reflect Traveller heritage and history and in terms of Róisín bringing her unique perspective, and creative energy to the Museum’s as Artist in Residence during 2018.

Quote from Helen Beaumont, Education Officer, National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts & History

 

Using the Museum's historical textile collections and material from the Museum’s handling collection as resources, aided by Museum curators and educators, the group worked with Róisín de Buitléar to challenge ideas based on portable safekeeping of objects, cultural clothing, remembrance textiles, pockets, and objects associated with memory.

The Traveller’s ‘Beady Pocket’ served as a generous bag and useful holder for essential objects needed for a life on the road, and are an important cultural item of clothing for Travelling people. Items such as a knife, money, jewellery and a needle and thread, hidden in the seam, were common objects that were kept in the deep pockets. The decorative pocket also served as a memory bag. The pockets were decorated with small buttons medals and beads which were exchanged between women, on leaving a site or moving on to a new location.

Quote from Róisín de Buitléar, Artist in Residence 2018