“[MOTHERBABYHOME] is a confrontation, a lamentation, a powerful objection and a revolution.”
— Pádraig Ó Tuama

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. ”
— Adam Hanna, Poetry, Politics and the Law in Modern Ireland (Syracuse University Press)
“at once a memorial and a quiet, angry scream, ‘their remains remnants always crying in unison”
— Laura Hackett, Times Literary Supplement
“It is an exact and exacting record of trauma.”
— Gregory Betts, The Irish Times
“MOTHERBABYHOME is a necessary work of ‘committed’ experimental poetry in Ireland.”
— Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements

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.

“Campanello [...] steps into the role of the community who must engage in the poem’s ‘performative commemoration’ and thereby be transformed.”
— Ailbhe Darcy, Poetry Ireland Review
Performing MOTHERBABYHOME at Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century, a three-day visual poetry festival inspired by the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s curated by SJ Fowler and Chris McCabe. Photo © Elisabe…

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