Power Dressing in Feminist Style: The Feminist Constitutional Futures Cloak

The Feminist Constitutional Futures Cloak (FemCon Cloak) is an artwork designed and embroidered for the Northern/Ireland Feminist Constitutional Futures Project by Emma Campbell and Grace McMurray (Array Collective) in 2023.

The Feminist Constitutional Futures Project (FemCon) is about imagining what a Feminist constitutional future could look like on the island of Ireland. Co-run by Prof Máiréad Enright, Prof Catherine O’Rourke and Prof Aoife O’Donoghue, the project embraces feminist ideas of constitutional law, but also law and art, law and literature, especially feminist utopias, as well as drawing inspiration from the work of activist feminists in law and policy across Northern Ireland and Ireland historically, and in recent years.

As part of this work, FemCon approached artists and members of the Turner Prize winning ARRAY collective, Emma Campbell and Grace McMurray with a commission to consider the possibilities of feminist constitutional futures through the lens of art. Both Emma and Grace have long experience of feminist activism and art. A West Cork cloak, which had belonged to Aoife’s Great Grandmother, Hannah Hurley was proposed as inspiration. West Cork cloaks (and their equivalents across the island) were worn by ordinary women, like coats, and were still being worn by a small number into the 1960s when Hannah Hurley died.

The FemCon Cloak, while inspired by the West Cork Cloak, takes a number of other inspiration points. The embroidery on the back comes from Political, Feminist Constitution of the State: The Impossible Country We Build as Women a feminist manifesto written by Bolivian feminists during a period of constitutional change. Emma states that ‘[t]he inscription from the Bolivian feminist manifesto is also a call to remember to keep inviting people in, remember where we all came from (the parents, the home, the kitchen table) and not to separate the body politic from the nourishing or needy bodies – it’s a false delineation.’

The embroidery, completed by Grace, includes the following

The are also mirrors, or metaphors, for society ladies and strivers to look through, for single mothers and grandmothers raising children, for secretaries, for hysterics and prudes, the unemployed and others, for all those who are looking for the breaking point in society, the place of rupture and rebellion rather than the conciliation of silence and the comfortable complicity of our own subjection.

The lining of the cloak includes El pañuelo verde, a symbol of Latin American feminism and activism. Latin American feminist activism and in particular their assertion of constituent power and the right to make constitutions and to make them anywhere and in any form, is directly inspirational for FemCon. Looking to the experience, knowledge and solidarity feminists across the globe, not in, as another South American feminist activist Verónica Gago states, in a panoramic sense but in connection with each other.

In Emma’s words

‘I suppose for me the amazing thing about a cloak is because it is no longer an everyday item (for most people) it is definitely associated with ritual and ceremony and quite a lot of the work around Array’s sibín was figuring out ways to re-introduce ritual for people who felt pushed out or finished with religion and noticing that we do still love to gather and form our new new community making rituals. So especially wanton women, queers, rabble rousers, all need a cloak!!  Of course, there is the association with witches … I also think about how the abortion campaign across the island utilised the campaign tee/ sweatshirt to take back our bodies through what we were communicating on our chests, like the El pañuelo verde (featured inside)…It also reminds me of how much our own ancient culture wrote out the powerful roles of women like Brigid and the feast days we used to have for them that were as festive and widespread if not more popular than the likes of St Patrick.

The FemCon cloak is available to be used by feminists across the island in ways we currently cannot imagine, in claiming their constituent power, in quiet and loud ways, in big and small ceremonial ways, as celebrations and ways of remembering. In solidarity, in openness and a spirt of feminist constitutional imagining.

So far, the FemCon cloak has been worn for Bunreacht Aloud a durational reading of Bunreacht na hÉireann by Maebh Harding and Julie Morrissy, and by the Legal Chorus (played by Esther Ayo-James) in Morrissy’s poetry-play “Certain Individual Women”, presented by Fishamble: The New Play Company at TU Shannon, Limerick City in May 2024.

To inquire about using the FemCon Cloak in your own feminist events please contact Aoife O’Donoghue at Queen’s University Belfast.

Image of cloak worn by the Play: “Certain Individual Women” by Julie Morrissy presented by Fishamble. TU Shannon, Limerick City, May 2024.