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Glass act shines light on health scandal

A beautiful, wearable dress, made of thousands of mosaic pieces, was a hit at last month’s Shorelines Festival in Portumna. It then travelled to a glass festival in France to feature in a glass fashion show. Artist Alison Mac Cormaic tells JUDY MURPHY how Ireland’s CervicalCheck scandal inspired the dress that she created with her daughter Mairidh.

“Mosaics are having a bit of a moment,” says Alison Mac Cormaic. And she should know.

Alison is the woman responsible for a stunning shift dress, made of thousands of tiny mosaic pieces, that stopped people in their tracks when it was shown at Portumna’s Irish Workhouse Centre as part of last month’s Shorelines Festival.

This unique and beautiful dress, made by Alison and designed by her daughter Mairidh, also has a deadly serious message.

Called Yes to the Test, it’s their response to Ireland’s Cervical Check scandal which led to the needless deaths of so many women, among them the mother of one of Mairidh’s schoolfriends.

After its success in Portumna, the dress travelled to the historic town of Biot in France’s  Côte d’Azur where it was exhibited at BIG an international glass festival.

With a show dedicated to wearable glass fashion, BIG celebrates the town’s artisan glass tradition, Alison explains, adding that there are several other events worldwide that combine glass and couture.

For her and Mairidh, showing Yes to the Test at Biot and here in Galway was their unique way of shining a light on this country’s CervicalCheck cancer scandal, something Alison describes “an appalling example of gender inequality within Irish healthcare”.

The intricate pattern of the mosaic dress is inspired by images of real cancerous cervical cells. These are similar to the cells that went undiagnosed because of misinterpreted screening samples taken from women in Ireland between 2011 and 2018, she explains, adding that this failure was compounded by subsequent cover-ups.

Alison, who is originally from Scotland and now lives in Loughrea, is fascinated by cells as well as by glass, and has also worked with students in the city’s Galway Community College to create a mosaic inspired by brain cells.

Located at Ballybane Library, that project was funded by Cúram, the University of Galway Research Centre that promotes STEM subjects and the links between science and arts.

The students explored how brain cells behaved as people were thinking, and then made drawings of the cells, after which they created individual mosaics. Alison took these individual pieces, arranging them and creating the background for the largescale work that’s now sited in Ballybane.

“I’m interested in looking at cells,” she says, explaining that they are extraordinary – and surprising.

“I couldn’t believe something so pretty could be so awful,” she observes of the cancer cells that are represented in the mosaic dress.

Even as it highlights a shocking and avoidable tragedy, this is a beautiful, colourful piece, and Alison is justifiably proud of what she and Mairidh achieved, because making a wearable glass dress is very hard.

The task was somewhat easier because the material she used was Mexican smalti. This mosaic glass is thinner than the more usual Italian variety and it has a greater range of colours. Because it comes from outside the EU, it’ s also more expensive, but Alison loves it.

Apart from the pink pieces which she designed to represent the cancer cells, all the other mosaic pieces in the dress were upcycled. She crafted them from cut-offs that a fellow glass-artist friend donated.

To ensure there were no sharp edges on the glass, Alison used a process that was new to her.

Called ‘tumbling’ it’s usually used to polish gemstones and it got rid of any jagged edges, which was vital if the dress was to be wearable. An unintended side effect was that it made the glass pieces incredibly smooth, Alison adds.

Pictured: Alison Mac Cormaic in her studio, working on the large foxglove mosaic that she created for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services unit in  Merlin Park. She is inspired by nature and patterns. PHOTO DAVID RUFFLES.

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