10.08.2025
On this episode of K7 dans la 4L, weaver Margaret Rose Cunnigham shares insights into her creative practice, specifically in relation to an artwork twenty six years in the making; a map woven from remnants of hand dyed wool and scrap yarn gathered over decades to trace a route around Glencolmcille. Margaret’s woven drawing of the Turas Colmcille describes the traditional 5.5km pilgrimage, representing each of its ancient stations, pre-Christian monuments, a holy well and decorated cross slabs and pillar stones with intricately intertwined threads.
Margaret is known as a consummate singer of traditional song, director of the Folk Village Museum and people gatherer in Glencolmcille. In her tapestries, Margaret draws on the landscape around her and the stories it holds, with compelling imagery, both pictorial and abstract, her work evokes a deeply atmospheric sense of this place.
Representing the age-old skills of wool production (shearing, spinning and naturally dyeing yarn) as a vital form of artistic expression today, threads of Margarets many talents in draughtsmanship and song weave together to form impressionistic and vibrant tapestries. In contextualising her process, Margaret describes the importance of preserving skills and techniques that have been handed down through families in local the community, ‘many aspects of our cultural heritage have been lost with the passing of just one generation’.
Margaret’s tapestries carry forward embodied forms of knowledge to create a vernacular expression that is both historical and contemporary, and so she preserves the tradition in this area with its early medieval and Neolithic heritage.
K7 dans la 4L is tour de force mobile broadcasting arts club, live streamed on Twitch with a curated series of artist’s talks, readings and interviews that were broadcast directly from the Renault 4. A forum for discourse and debate around contemporary culture, a chat room that was utilised to discuss art, landscape and tradition associatively and in a shared stream of consciousness.
