“What could I do that no one else could do? This was what I could do. Feeling so lost but deep down, I was finding my way.”
Extract from what can you do

What do we leave behind, take forward, carry with us? Through a selection of clothing, objects and text, Joanne Hynes explores fictional, autobiographic and creative meaning in gesture, process, and materiality. This first solo exhibition is formed around extracts from Hynes’s fictional essays, prose, poetry and short stories. Hynes carries ideas of loss and belonging into material questioning through collecting, making and writing, investigating the notion of staying present with discomfort through process. In so doing, Hynes reflects on design thinking from 25 years in fashion, marking a point of reconciliation in her creative practice.

For Hynes, these are intersecting practices. In writing from the body, from memory and the sensory, she seeks to write from the lack of something, from a wildness, from a barely formed language, which is also materialised through the garments and objects in the exhibition. The tension between the written word and the materiality of clothing is central to this process, and as such both are juxtaposed and physically combined in fragments and assemblages, provoking associative meaning. These are pieces of the self.
Extract from show notes by Dr Rebecca Bell

To coincide with ‘what we carry with us’, the Gallery is hosting an evening with Joanne Hynes on Thursday 20 July beginning with an ‘In Conversation’ with Dr Rebecca Bell at 6pm. Dr Rebecca Bell is a writer, painter, researcher and lecturer.

Joanne Hynes graduated from Central Saint Martins MA Fashion in 2001 and established her own label in 2003. Hynes’s identifiable signature textile and embellishment focused designs have retailed worldwide. An ongoing collaboration with Dunnes in Ireland which launched in September 2016 is an extension of her unconventional and evocative narratives around fashion and clothing. Alongside her own practice she has lectured in Fashion Design at LSAD Limerick, Wigan and Leigh India and the University of Hertfordshire, England.

Produced in collaboration with dp3.0.