“Kimberly Campanello is an extraordinary poet. Her long sequence MOTHERBABYHOME is a fragmentary piece bringing small memories of abandoned people to our ears in simple language that is overwhelming. I heard her recite some of this last year at the Of Mouth event in Belfast and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It 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.
“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. They are spaces that exist outside the narratives, and therefore the elisions and erasures, of the state. Indeed, as is the case in Campanello’s poetry-object, they can enact new forms in which these elisions and erasures become visible.”
Reader’s Edition Book
Kimberly Campanello’s complete performance of MOTHERBABYHOME in the UCD Special Collections Reading Room. Part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive.
MOTHERBABYHOME features in the groundbreaking anthology Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry.
Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry is a 260-page, full-colour book featuring visual poetry from 36 women in 21 countries, a foreword by Johanna Drucker, and essays on digital visual poetry and the future of visual poetry by Fiona Becket, on women in asemic writing by Natalie Ferris, and on feminist practice with Letraset, the ephemeral and fragility by Kate Siklosi. The book also features an excerpt from a roundtable interview of 13 women artists who work with language and craft. A list of 1181 women currently making visual poetry is also included. The anthology is edited by Amanda Earl.
“Instead of performing an idealised form of writing – performing the self from whom the poem issues forth – Campanello performs an idealised moment of reading; and by doing so, she steps into the role of the community who must engage in the poem’s ‘performative commemoration’ and thereby be transformed.”
“It is an exact and exacting record of trauma.”
“MOTHERBABYHOME is a crucial attempt at a pushing language through the enfolding of multiple voices and perspectives to a point where it can be adequate to the enormity of the fact it needs to express. In this, it’s a necessary work of ‘committed’ experimental poetry in Ireland.”
“MOTHERBABYHOME brings together a cacophony of memories and voices to create something new, at once a memorial and a quiet, angry scream, ‘their remains remnants always crying in unison’.”
“Kimberly Campanello’s steadfast commitment in this avant object is breathtaking and humbling. This is the work of a great, great artist, and of a single, attentive human being who listens with intelligent receptiveness and with full love.”
“MOTHERBABYHOME demonstrates not only the enduring power of visual poetics but also the ways in which finely crafted language, informed by a highly self-conscious spatiality, speak to some of the most disturbing aspects of our time and, crucially, speaks for the silenced and the marginalised among us. ”
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 © Elisabeth Greil for the British Council
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.