“[MOTHERBABYHOME] is a confrontation, a lamentation, a powerful objection and a revolution.”
The St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home was run by the Bon Secours Sisters on behalf of the Irish State to house unmarried mothers and their children. The location of the graves of 796 infants and children who died in the Home between 1926 and 1961 is unknown, though local knowledge, the research of local historian Catherine Corless, and test excavations point to a field near the old site of the Home, as well as the likelihood that some children were illegally adopted. International media attention in 2014 led to the Irish government’s Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. The government’s final report was delayed repeatedly and finally released in 2021 amidst intense criticism from survivors and human rights experts. The government’s inadequate redress scheme and the ongoing delay excavating the grounds of this and other homes continues to be a source of anger and trauma.
MOTHERBABYHOME (2019) is a 796-page ‘report’ comprised of conceptual and visual poetry. An excavation of voices, the poems are composed entirely of text taken from historical archives and contemporary sources related to the Home, including files given to Kimberly by Catherine Corless. The 796 poems are printed on transparent vellum and held in a handmade oak box. The poetry-object is held by the National Poetry Library (UK), University College Dublin Special Collections, Cardiff University Special Collections, and the Brotherton Library Special Collections at the University of Leeds. MOTHERBABYHOME is also published as a reader’s edition book available from zimZalla Avant Objects.
MOTHERBABYHOME is now fully digitised and available online from Cultural Collections at the University of Leeds.
Kimberly Campanello’s complete performance of MOTHERBABYHOME in the UCD Special Collections Reading Room. Part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive.
“As Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME reminds us, though poems can never substitute for legal scrutiny, or replace the need for the pursuit of justice by a legal system, we should nevertheless not underestimate what they can do. ”
“at once a memorial and a quiet, angry scream, ‘their remains remnants always crying in unison”
“It is an exact and exacting record of trauma.”
“MOTHERBABYHOME is a necessary work of ‘committed’ experimental poetry in Ireland.”
Podcasts, Interviews & Online events
Kimberly discusses MOTHERBABYHOME for ‘Come, let the blazing truth blind’.
Kimberly reads from MOTHERBABYHOME and is interviewed as part of Red Line Book Festival (Dublin) 2020.
on MOTHERBABYHOME
Becket, Fiona. Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman. Routledge, 2025.
Collins, Lucy. “Telling Lives: Irish Poets in the Archive.” Études irlandaises
Crowley, Emma. 2026. “EXCAVATORY ART: A Transnational Reading of Cultural Activism in Creative Responses to Ireland’s Architecture of Containment.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
Darcy, Ailbhe. 2020. “recent documentary poetry in performance.” The Poetry Ireland Review
Darcy, Ailbhe, 2026. “Three Irish Poems for Thinking About Activism,” Teaching Modern Irish Poetry, edited by Anna Teekell, Guinn Batten. Modern Language Association.
González, Marcos Hernádez. 2021. "MOTHER, BABY, HOME: trauma y silencio en la poesía irlandesa contemporánea." La hoja verde de la lengua
Hanna, Adam. 2021. “Contemporary Encounters with the Law: Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME (2019) and Julie Morrissy’s Positions Gendered Male in Bunreacht Na hÉireann / 1937 Constitution of Ireland (2020).” Nordic Irish Studies
Hanna, Adam. 2022. Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland
McDaid, Ailbhe. 2024. “Forms of Resistance: Witnessing Violence in Recent Experimental Irish Poetry.” Études irlandaises
Morrissy, Julie. 2025. "Towards a Poetics of Interruption: The Influence of North American Mixed-Genre Poetries on Recent Irish Poetry" Humanities
Mulhall, Anne. 2021. "Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry, Beyond the Now." in A History of Irish Women’s Poetry.
Swanepoel, Charika. 2021 “To ‘Sweeten Ireland’s Wrong’: Contemporary Performance Poetry and Digital Activism in Ireland.” Nordic Irish Studies
“Campanello [...] steps into the role of the community who must engage in the poem’s ‘performative commemoration’ and thereby be transformed.”
Performing MOTHERBABYHOME at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a three-day visual poetry festival. Photo © Elisabeth Greil for the British Council