Mavourneen Dooley
𐙚 Mavourneen in {Consumer}land
𐙚 American Girl Doll
𐙚 Burning Wrath
𐙚 Gentle Offering
𐙚 Aphrodisiac
𐙚 You Can Watch Me Sleeping
About
Burning Wrath
2024-2025
Hand Embroidery on Satin, Wooden Pew
78 x 94 x 4 cm
183 x 87 x 53 cm
It’s the first truly hot day of the summer. The sun’s oppressive waves of heat beat down on me. A bead of sweat drips down my back, below my cardigan and white collared button-up. I lay down on the grass, stretching my limbs out to try and cool myself down, but my skirt, made of stiff dark denim, won’t let me move my legs apart. My body looks like a cross spread out on the ground. My best friend lies next to me. She’s taken off her cardigan even though it’s not allowed. I can’t help but notice how freckles her pale arms have already become, even though we haven’t even gotten to the end of June. The palms of our hands sting, dark red lines striped across them, and we interlock our small fingers. Flowers stick out of our messy braids. Our teacher calls us from the doorway to the church, we rush up and run in, the skirt catching our ankles each time we make long strides. The door closes, and another school day commences.
Burning Wrath is a two-piece, mixed-media installation that tells the story of the church I attended school in as a child. In 2007, during the time I was attending school there, it burned down in the middle of the night. In 2018, almost ten years later, the church burned down again, its repairs from the first fire still being built up. The cause of both fires was undetermined and caused religious unrest in the community. In a quote from a New York Post article about the fire in 2018, “Locals wondering why the church repeatedly has incurred burning wrath”.
Each embroidered piece on the church pew shows icons of my girlhood. A floral wreath representing the ones my friends and I would make and wear during the spring months at school, a braided lock of hair with a bow at the end, which my best friends at school and I would trade, and a pair of discarded underwear left on the seat of the pew.