Fern O’Carolan, between piety and pleasure

Bebo, Myspace, and the early days of Tumblr were sacred vessels of early 2000s internet culture. More than just websites, they were a chance to escape and reinvent ourselves, all from the sanctity of a teenage bedroom. For Fern O’Carolan, they were just that: a break away from the religious subjugation of her single sex Catholic convent school in Dublin. “My teachers hated me because I had black hair and listened to emo music,” Fern laughs. “They were like, ‘she needs to repent!’” This quiet rebellion that began in Fern’s early teens laid the foundations for the playful teasing of religious power structures in her exhibition ‘Guilt and Grace’ at Neven Gallery. You can feel the tension between these two manifestos of morality.

Bethnal Green feels optimistically sunny for early March. After waiting for half an hour in the gallery with Helen, Neven Gallery momager, she announces that Fern is running late – understandable after such an important night. Helen and I compare pacifiers (vapes) while we wait. Eventually, Fern stumbles in fashionably late and all is forgiven as her chaotic energy, sweetness and undeniable Irish charm consumes the room. We do a quick photoshoot in the gallery with Helen flawlessly assuming the role of creative director. Fern poses next to the slightly sweet, slightly threatening Velora and Vespera – two sculptures resembling bestial teddies fashioned out of leather. I’m unsure if I want to cuddle, spank, or run away from them (or all three). Vespera lies face down on the floor, a stuffed animal that could be described as a ‘bondage bunny’, leaning half submissively, half menacingly on a prayer cushion, animated as a figure of the polarity between piety and pleasure. The sculptures nod to the work of Mike Kelley, who Fern cites as a big inspiration, along with the ‘king of subculture’ Dash Snow. It’s the day after Fern’s opening, so I suggest that we go for a drink to debrief the show. I imagine that she might be grateful for the opportunity to channel some ‘hair of the dog’ magic with a couple of cocktails. We head next door to a bar, the aptly named Satan’s Whiskers, and order two Mischief cocktails – it’s like they knew we were coming…

You don’t need to be Simone de Beauvoir to know that femininity is fraught with contradictions. Be sexy! But not too sexy, and don’t be too aware of your sexiness. Be desirable, but be modest and respectable. Damned if we do, and damned if we don’t, femininity feels like a profoundly contradictory and dilemmatic space that often seems impossible to navigate. I can imagine how, for someone brought up at an all-girls Catholic Convent school hellbent (pardon the pun) on instating the importance of piety, that this contradiction is jacked up on steroids. Fern describes her experiences at the convent as a “form of brainwashing” that she learnt to adapt to. She flirts with the tension between the two worlds, the ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’, sex and purity, through explorations of nostalgia in personal and national history. 

I came across Fern’s work on Instagram last year, and we had been mutuals for a while (I guess you could say I was one of Fern’s ‘loyal story likers’). This was the first time I’d seen Fern’s work IRL. Immediately, I was struck by how different ‘Guilt and Grace’ is to her previous shows I’d seen in pictures, which focused more on two dimensional imagery. Breaking away from this, Fern’s new show illustrates a confidence in the materiality of her work, allowing her works to breathe and stand on their own, sensual scraps of leather from her own wardrobe stretched and taut to make their own kind of canvases. “Everyone keeps saying ‘we didn’t expect this from you, this is a real curveball,’” Fern giggles, swirling her Mischief. “I’ve learnt to let go of insecurity. That’s been the biggest lesson – to be honest with yourself. If you think something’s shit, it probably is!” 

Fern has been collecting ephemera since her adolescence. What she describes as “hoarding tendencies” have now become a crucial part of her process; she is a collector, exemplified in the prayer cushions, tapestries, crucifixes and an image of the Virgin Mary that appear in the show. She also scours the internet for materials: “I get into wormholes on eBay. It’s such a dated thing that a lot of older people use without realising how valuable things are.” Thanks to unassuming sellers, Fern has mined items like the  ‘Precious Blood Badges’ – used in Catholicism as ritualistic amulets of protection – which feature in her work, Precious Blood. “Not quite as glamorous as Angelina Jolie’s locket”. These items, now recontextualised to a space removed from their origin, seem to hold the weight of the ghosts of their owners – you can feel the guilt, the sacrifice and the devotion in their presence. Fern offers them up to us, inviting new convergences. The materials making up the body of the sculptures look like they’ve been salvaged from a bedroom floor of a girl getting ready for a night out on the town: lingerie, sexy skin-tight leather and flashy buckles pulled out of drawers and flung around the room in an excitable chaos.

The leather structures sewn and fastened into canvases as visions of devotion are made from scraps of her own clothing, and, ironically, use skills she learnt from nuns at school. She also recalls watching videos by American abstinence-only lecturer Pam Stenzel. “She would be screaming that if you have sex before marriage, you’d get AIDS and die.” Sex equalling death and gender segregated classes of young girls being taught needlework – a mark of marriage suitability – feels more 1950s than 1990s. In the art world, embroidery and tapestry work have traditionally been discounted as a women’s craft, of lesser merit than the male-dominated medium of painting. Fern subverts this ‘female’ craft, an emblem of submission and sublimation, and recontexualises its meaning while interrogating the Catholic patriarchal implementation of female sexuality (or lack thereof). 

Alongside all this, Fern is training to be an occupational therapist, which she sees as an “extension of her art”, as there are sociological aspects to both. Although it strays from the art world (where sometimes nuances and things being ‘open to interpretation’ can become pretentious and gimmicky) in the sense that there’s “always a right answer for everything.” “But if I weren’t doing that, I think I would be a dominatrix.”

Now, I’m partial to a crucifix earring as much as the next girl, but the extent to which Catholic aesthetics have dominated internet trends in recent years verges on fetishisation, far removed from its original iconography. ‘Catholic girl’ or ‘Catholic core’ aesthetics have saturated TikTok, with brands like Praying’s viral ‘father, son, holy spirit’ bikini, and artists like Lana Del Rey’s Lolita-esque image portraying a hyper sexualised inversion of Catholicism. In Fern’s sculpture, Angel, its title has been stamped into faux leather in cursive diamante crystals. Angel resembles the sort of y2k aesthetic that concentrates my Instagram feed as a trendy tramp-stamp. Of course, this is the point. In ‘Guilt and Grace’, Fern knowingly winks to her audience. At times, it’s uncertain which side of that line the works stand on – it trips us up. It’s like the horseshoe theory but for repressed sexuality and hyper sexualised ‘virginal innocence’. Fern’s creations come back on themselves, pervaded by the eroticism of Catholic iconography. 

More contradictions appear in the commercialisation of faith that is so common in Catholicism. Kitschy objects like plastic, mass-made rosary beads promise enlightenment and divinity as a commodity. Fern skewers and subverts this absurdity, where the innocent plight for holiness and Catholic aesthetics are hijacked as fashion trends. She playfully mocks a world that tells us that Godly salvation and entry to heaven can be bought, like a ticket to Alton Towers. Want to buy a candle that will save you from eternal damnation? Uh, is the pope Catholic?