Feral Cat

Selected works, 2024–2026 | Chérie Bridget Mary Driver

Feral Cat is an exhibition of drawings, paintings, six concertina sketchbooks and two display trays emerging from a two-year practice-based research inquiry into the relationship between psyche, landscape and the archetypal feminine. Drawing upon Jungian and post-Jungian thought, the research explores the feral cat as an ambiguous figure of the feminine: elusive, resistant to domestication and moving between the familiar and the unknown. Through drawing, dreamwork, active imagination and encounters with the Irish landscape, the work investigates how images emerge at the thresholds between conscious and unconscious experience.

Central to the research is Mide, the mythic Fifth Province of Ireland, understood not simply as a geographical territory but as an imaginal centre in which inner and outer worlds might meet. Alongside Mide, Oweynagat, the cave at Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, offers a more embodied threshold. Associated in Irish mythology with passage to the Otherworld, the cave becomes a site of descent, darkness and encounter. Together, these landscapes establish a dialogue between the imaginal and the material, informing a practice concerned with what remains hidden, inaccessible or unresolved.

The six concertina sketchbooks form the central vessels of the exhibition. Made through fieldwork, dream mapping, drawing and painting, they gather fragments of experience without requiring a fixed sequence or definitive interpretation. Folded, they hold their images inward; opened, they become changing journeys through colour, gesture, memory and landscape. Without a single beginning or end, each unfolding creates new relationships between images.

Alongside the concertinas, drawings and paintings extend these encounters across the gallery walls. Two display trays contain material drawn from envelopes accumulated during the research, representing two distinct strands of inquiry: Imaginal / Mide and Oweynagat / Connacht. Their contents include drawings, paintings and material fragments that bring different moments of the research into proximity. These arrangements operate as provisional constellations, allowing associations to emerge between otherwise disparate images, marks and experiences.

The exhibition understands artistic practice as a means of attending to the unknown rather than resolving it. The concertina, envelope and display tray each function as a container, holding material that can be concealed, revisited and rearranged. Their capacity to open and close reflects the movement between concealment and revelation that runs throughout the research.

Feral Cat occupies this moment of opening: an imaginal threshold where landscape, psyche and artistic practice converge, and where something previously inaccessible might begin to emerge.