Secrets Of The Magdalene Laundries Analysis

This essay will discuss a contemporary art piece by Diane Fenster and Michael McNabb. Their work, ‘Secrets of the Magdalene Laundries’ is an installation piece which was exhibited in New York and San Francisco between 2000 and 2004. Secrets of the Magdalene Laundries is a room size installation. It creates a symbolic laundry environment by combining the elements of both photography and sound. Exhibited in a white gallery, Secrets of the Magdalene Laundries consists of 15 bedsheets, ranging in sizes from normal to king size. It focuses not only on the exquisite photography but the public’s engagement through the use of a psychological fourth dimension.
Fenster focuses on the photographs, which have been printed on cotton bed sheets- a similar
The theological questioning and participation of the church is not what interests her, but rather the representation of memory and imagination. “Secrets of the Magdalene Laundries is not intended to be a documentary about the Irish Catholic Church run prison laundry systems that were in operation from the 1800s to the 1970s but is instead is an imaginative inquiry into the question of what enabled the women incarcerated in the laundry prisons to survive in such a punitive environment.” (Fenster,
Is it their concept behind the piece? Is it the original piece? Or perhaps it’s the audience that create this work of art. Before the transferring of images onto these bedsheets, they are merely just an object. However, without that object, what defines them as a piece of art? One simple word is what places together each of these pieces; contextualisation. Through the use of context, this installation becomes a story as opposed to just an object; the sheer simplicity of storytelling through conceptual visuals. “Conceptual artists were influenced by the brutal... for Conceptual artists; art need not look like a traditional work of art, or even take any physical form at all.” (Kosuth,