Arranged Mirage is a two-artist exhibition showcasing bold new work by Backwater Artists Group studio members Amna Walayat and Tina Whelan. Walayat, a Cork-based artist of Pakistani origin, draws from Indo-Persian symbolism to explore identity, displacement, and the myth of return, blending personal narrative with collective memory. Whelan, an Irish artist and researcher, works across painting, sculpture, video and textiles to investigate generational trauma and the embodied experience of womanhood—often through the lens of Catholic ethics and maternal legacy. The artists share a language of memory, myth, and transformation—where tradition is not upheld, but unstitched and remade.
ARRANGED MIRAGE : a shared grammar of myth, memory, and transformation.
To walk through Arranged Mirage is to enter a private cosmos that pulses outward.
By confronting interiority—by offering shrine and miniature as active agents—the artists remind us: belief doesn’t live only in collective ideology, it lives in each quiet altar built inside. In the overlap of Tina and Amna’s languages we find a new, arranged, mythic mirage.
In Arranged Mirage, Tina Whelan and Amna Walayat draw from the ornamental traditions of their cultural inheritances to build something that feels simultaneously intimate and insurgent. The exhibition unfolds like a series of veiled gestures: deeply personal but insistently political.
Upon entering the space, you are struck with by the hum of a deep blue wall—lapis lazuli blue. It’s colour deliberately echoes the rich pigments of traditional Indo-Persian miniature, where lapis was once ground by hand into ultramarine for sacred and courtly painting. This is no coincidence. Amna Walayat makes her own pigments using the classical Persian method, a meditative process that mirrors the themes of care and continuity that run through her work.
The story of The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century Sufi poem, moves through Amna Walayat’s work. The tale, which sees thirty birds searching for a king only to find themselves, becomes a framework for self-reflection, migration, and identity formation. In Walayat’s hands, paradise becomes neither destination nor doctrine, but a layered, unstable space—one that holds both rupture and renewal. (“When you have broken free of yourself, a thousand doors will open.” – Farid ud-Din Attar, 12th century Sufi mystic and poet)
In Amna’s miniature’s, ink blossoms into paradise‑gardens, Persian domes dissolve into iris and onion‑skin petals. Each brushstroke roots in traditional illustration, yet escapes expectation. Contemporary symbols also surface. Three balloons float through one of Amna’s compositions, disarming and interrupting the classical frame. It’s a quiet break with tradition, aimed not at honouring purity, but at reimagining what tradition can become through transformation.
At first glance, Tina Whelan shrine recalls the heilige hoekjes of Catholic Flanders—“holy corners” women once maintained in the home as places of daily prayer and remembrance. Tina’s shrine is a tender, guarded altar that both honours and unravels. It is layered with pieces of cloth, talismans, dried petals, found offerings from the sea, small relics—these are personal liturgies. Tina’s summons the private, the hidden rituals of womanhood—her body, her memory—stitched into an insurgency of myth.
Punctuating the shrine are smaller works that evoke early forms of femininity, complicating their legacy. These pieces—delicate in scale, ornate in presentation—unravel an ambiguous story. A lavish frame surrounds what appears to be a portrait, but the face is indistinct, veiled in mould, time, or abstraction. The image resists clarity and recalls the historical practice of arranged marriages, where women often encountered only a flattering likeness—painted or embellished—of the man they were promised to, long before meeting him in life. These portraits, curated to please, rarely represented the truth. Whelan’s use of erosion and decay becomes pointed. These gilded works do not immortalize their subjects—they obscure them. They speak to how femininity has been idealised and distorted, polished into something unrecognisable. They honour not what was shown, but what was hidden.
A large vessel chimes with music that fills the exhibition space, it draws the visitor in and asks them to peer inside and acts as a portal. It transports the viewer to video which underscores a central premise of Arranged Mirage. In Tina’s film, we see the artists’ hands—Tina’s and Amna’s—carefully packing a suitcase. Layer by layer, their clothing is folded, arranged, nested into shared space. Clothing here is a form of self-portraiture, intimate and tactile. To pack is to prepare for movement, to negotiate what is carried forward and what is left behind. It evokes the shared authorship, cultural overlap and transport of identity across space and history.
This small filmic moment—tucked into the base of a ceramic portal—speaks to one of Arranged Mirage’s central concerns: how personal mythologies are constructed not alone, but alongside others.
Arranged Mirage softly insists. The artists offer a series of interior landscapes that ask the viewer to consider how identity re-authored. Whelan and Walayat don’t reject the symbols they’ve inherited; they repurpose them. In doing so, they open space for something less fixed and more human. In Arranged Mirage, belief becomes a private altar—gently arranged, never doctrinal, always in flux.
Enid Conway