Negotiating internment: craftwork and prisoner experience, Ireland 1916-1923

Summary

This paper will explore how the craftwork created by internees in the aftermath of the Easter Rising through to the end of the Civil War was used to mediate shifting social and political identities as Ireland moved from colonial subject to semi-independent state. The creation of objects such as metal brooches and rings, bone harps and crosses, and macramé handbags and teacosies was not only an expression of intellectual freedom and personal capacity, but was intimately bound up with the construction of changing concepts of gender, temporality and nationhood. A productive act in what was otherwise a reductive and deeply depersonalising context, the craftwork of the Civil War helped limit the sense of alienation experienced as former comrades subjected prisoners to the violence of internment in a bitter re-enactment of the institutional technologies of imperialism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Colonial Institutions and Their Enduring Material Aftermaths   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-12,02