Our Lady of the Home - 2025

Our Lady of the Home is the first in a series of tongue-in-cheek stained glass panels reimagining the iconic Dublin statue ‘Lady on the Rock’ as the goddess of housing. A continuation of the ‘Shrine to the Housing Gods’ sculpture, in this work she retains her familiar pose, but she now holds a house key, a symbol of security, belonging, and the elusive dream of home ownership.

The panel borrows from the visual language of religious iconography and devotion, reflecting the desperation that drives us to gather, pray, and appeal to forces beyond our control, a form of self-care in the face of political neglect. Embedded within the glass is a childlike drawing of “home,” the kind many of us drew in primary school: a house, a tree, the sun. Alongside it sits a prayer: “Oh Lady on the Rock, hear our prayers for a gaff with a good BER.” The drawing reflects the innocent, universal understanding of a home, while the prayer captures the grim reality of adulthood, where the dream of warmth and shelter has been reduced to begging for the bare minimum of habitability.

By sanctifying the everyday struggle for housing, Our Lady of the Home exposes the absurdity of a crisis that leaves people pleading for shelter as though it were divine favour rather than a basic human right. It is both satire and lament, humour and protest, a panel that invites viewers to gather and reflect on the rituals we create when systems fail us.

At its core, the work is about survival, exposing the cruelty of our housing crisis while insisting on solidarity and the possibility of something better.