Engagment Details

• Artist: Maeve Collins
• Collaborators: The Gorella Girls (Gorella Village), Farheen Sheilk partner Bougainvillea Artist Retreat, Pryanka Giametti, Gurella Village and visiting artists
• Residency Host: Bougainvillea Artist Retreat, Udaipur, India
• Partners: Blue Drum, with emerging collaboration with artist Chiman Dangui, of Art Junction.
• Period: Initiated 2024 – ongoing, with return planned for 2026
• Focus: Mask-making, dance, printing, painting, art and activism, rural practice, exchange between Ireland and India

In 2024, Collins became the inaugural resident at Bougainvillea Artist Retreat in Udaipur, India. During this residency she co-founded The Gorella Girls with curator Farheen Sheilk and a group of young women from the tribal end of Gorella Village. Inspired by the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, the project created a space for the young women to explore self-expression, anonymity, and collective identity through workshops in mask-making, dance, printing, and painting.

Since then, the Gorella Girls have continued to meet most Sundays, working with Farheen and visiting artists, while maintaining contact with Maeve across borders. They exchange updates on their work, keeping alive a rhythm of persistence and collaboration that transcends distance.

Although the Gorella Girls’ practice does not involve straw, the agricultural setting of Gorella Village, the tacit knowledge and the values inherent to that -surrounded by wheat fields and shaped by milk production, inspired Maeve to continue her own strawing practice. The material became a way of weaving the land’s textures, histories, and labour into poetic and political form. This experience sharpened her central question as an artist with an Indo-Irish background: How might I define a rural art practice?

The project is part of a larger framework to establish with Blue Drum, Bougainvillea Artist Retreat and partner organisations, designed to build lasting exchanges between Indian and Irish artists and communities of place. Her emerging collaboration with Chiman Dangui is one gesture in this process, opening a dialogue between practices rooted in land, resilience, and community.

Colonial histories are an unavoidable undercurrent in this work. For Maeve, returning to Gorella Village in 2026 is a deliberate re-engagement with these entangled legacies, an opportunity to build further on a practice rooted in land, attentive to community, and alive to both history and hope.

As Maeve reflects, the Gorella Girls embody a “folding of time”: their Sunday gatherings, her absence and return, and the agricultural cycles of the village overlap and echo one another. In these folds, tradition and innovation coexist, the past re-emerges in the present, and collective making becomes a condition for future possibility.