My name is Emily Connolly. I am an artist, designer, researcher, and teacher from Galway, currently in my final year of the Art and Design Teacher Education programme at Limerick School of Art and Design.
My practice is rooted in observation and lived experience, focusing on everyday rituals and forms of labour that often go unnoticed. I am particularly interested in repetition, gesture, and rhythm, and how small, habitual actions shape bodies, spaces, and emotional states over time. Through this lens, my work asks how care, grief, and endurance are held within ordinary actions, and how these experiences can be translated into material form.
Over time, textiles have become central to my practice due to their tactile and embodied qualities. Stitch and layered fabric allow me to record movement and tension, functioning as a form of drawing through the hand. This approach is informed by Francis Crowe’s woven works, particularly her use of repeated gestures and subtle material shifts to hold memory and labour within cloth. I am also influenced by Rosie James’s installations, where domestic actions and duration create quiet, immersive spaces that foreground care and attention. Rudolf Laban’s movement theory further shapes my process, providing a framework for analysing effort, rhythm, and bodily strain, which I translate into marks, stitches, and structures.
My projects often begin with close observation. From Pour Decision, which explored the impulsive rhythms of student culture through print, to In Her Hands, a body of work responding to my grandmother’s daily routines during a period of grief, my practice examines how people cope, adapt, and continue through making. My current body of work focuses on my father’s construction labour and the physical strain intensified by his vision loss caused by sarcoidosis. Through drawing and embroidered textiles, I study gesture, balance, and endurance, translating moments of strain into layered material forms.
As both an artist and educator, I am interested in how art can act as a form of attention. My work seeks to give visibility to everyday resilience, proposing that ordinary actions, whether working, grieving, or maintaining routine, can function as quiet but powerful acts of strength.
