‘Tender Ruins’ is a new immersive soft-sculpture installation that explores the tension between trust, care, and the shifting experience of maternal indispensability. Rooted in fictional storytelling, the work examines the fragile space of unholding, shaped by emotions that emerge before rational decision-making. Drawing on textile processes, reflective writing, and soft sculpture, Suzanne weaves together often unseen emotional landscapes, excavating vulnerability, and the fragile process of building trust. The installation reflects single motherhood when a child becomes an adult, and parental roles begin to shift.

Developed through documenting personal experiences of navigating a child’s mental health struggles and addiction, the exhibited works function as props for an evolving stop-motion animation. Set from a current perspective, the narrative explores the experience of a mother navigating in the spaces between the cracks in a society shaped by housing insecurity, social fragmentation, and diminishing prospects for the next generation.

Susanne Horsch is a Swiss installation artist whose practice investigates the relationship between mind and body, drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theories to explore how emotions, thoughts, and lived experience shape individual and collective identities. A graduate of Ulster University Belfast with an MFA in Fine Art, she works primarily with textiles and soft sculpture as metaphors for weaving together often invisible elements of human experience. Reflective writing and textile techniques, including batik, underpin her practice, excavating hidden emotions, memories, and personal histories while inviting connection, understanding, and collective healing. Her evolving three-dimensional works create spaces for shared intimacy.

The development for this work has been supported by CCA Derry, the Arts Council Ireland through the Agility Award and by Kilkenny County Council through the Arts Act Grant.