Encounters. This is how it all begins.

Dr. Loïc Bourdeau

Art & Humanities Associate Dean for Research and Engagement

Maynooth University

I met Pauline Keena thanks to a colleague at Maynooth University, through her interest in making her work available in academic settings, searching for a collaboration that might help extend the scope of her work and bring a different understanding to it. Yet if collaboration often implies explanation, here it has been the reverse. It is not me clarifying her practice as an academic; it is me, an academic, learning from her. My work requires that I arrive with five-year plans and strategic visions; Pauline arrives with, in her own words, “a vague sensation of things.” I have tried to channel that phrase, but the truth is, I do not need to try. When I encounter her art, the sensations overtake me. This is the rhythm of our work together within the Medical Humanities cluster I co-lead in Maynooth’s Arts and Humanities Institute. I come from the side of narrative medicine, of motherhood studies, of literary studies. Pauline comes from the side of material practice, of threads, clamps, surfaces, drawings, fragments. Together, we create a space where matter and narrative, remains and words, speak back and forth.

Pauline’s tapestry is the work I cannot meet without my body responding first: an intake of breath, a tightening in the chest, a sudden stillness. For every clamp, a child. I saw it unfinished in her studio, and the visceral shock was immediate. It is a work about what remains. From the remains, she makes this thing. That making allows us to approach the unspeakable; not to solve it, not to close it off, but to let it be spoken.

This insistence on remains echoes another of my own encounters: with French writer Camille Laurens and her 1995 book, Philippe, which recounts the loss of her newborn son. Working with Camille and translating her book has been, to an extent, another linguistic exercise as we navigate different languages, different meanings, different experiences. It is also a commitment, born of a visceral reaction. In Laurens’s prose, maternal loss is not described; it is lived on the page. The book refuses consolation and insists instead on recognition. “Every mirror shows me my dead son; every mirror shows me my son and my own death,” Laurens writes. Each page of the book shows us her dead son, her face, and the system that allowed for death to happen. But it also shows us how literature gives life and holds space. Camille finishes her book with the following:

Every writer has an impossible sentence. For a long time, my impossible sentence began with I. … Until now, I always found it unthinkable—or rather, impracticable—to write I in a text destined for publication, to be made public. I is for me the pronoun of intimacy, it belongs only in love letters.

I write to say I love you. I scream because you did not scream, I write so that your unsounded cry might be heard—why did you not cry, Philippe, you who lived so strongly in my darkness? I write to loosen this pain of love, I love you, Philippe, I love you, I scream so that you may scream, I write so that you may live. Here lies Philippe Mézières. What no reality can ever do, words can. Philippe is dead, long live Philippe. Weep, you who read, weep: let your tears draw him out of nothingness.

Camille’s work operates at a threshold between presence and absence. It creates meaning from that which overwhelms language. Pauline’s work does that too; it creates form from the ineffable. In both cases—Laurens’s words, Keena’s materials—the encounter is what transforms. Neither text nor textile asks to be understood in the usual sense; they demand presence. They place us before grief, before remains, before that which is unbearable but also undeniable.

Art calls for hospitality. During my residency with Camille last May at the Children’s Hospital in Bordeaux, we led a workshop with a group of young paediatricians; our goal is to foster empathy and showcase the importance of perspective in care and the importance to listen to stories. To begin the session, I thanked them for welcoming us into their hospital and allowed myself a brief etymological detour. The word hospital comes from the Latin hospes, which also gives us hospitality. It carries a double meaning: hospes refers both to the one who receives—the host—and the one who is received—the guest.         

A hospital, then, is not only a place of care but also, potentially, a place of hospitality. Yet the word already contains a tension. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, echoing Albert Camus, “the host is hostage to the guest he holds hostage.” The roles of guest and host are constantly shifting. For Derrida, true hospitality means inventing a space of encounter as a unique event—something beyond pre-existing norms, beyond institutional frameworks—something almost poetic. To welcome, in that sense, is not to follow a protocol; it is to open oneself to the unknown, to accept being transformed by the other.

If philosophy helps us understand the conditions of hospitality, literature—and the lived experience of care—allow us to feel its texture. Philosopher Sara Cohen Shabot, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, proposes that we rethink childbirth, and more broadly the embodied experience of care, through vulnerability, dependence, and co-presence. She reminds us that childbirth is not an isolated act, but a relational, inter-corporeal process. To give birth, she writes, is to be with others—to be vulnerable before others, to depend on others. This is not weakness, but an ontological condition: a fundamental fact of human existence that speaks to how we inhabit the world, always in relation to others. From there, the ethics of care cannot be separated from a politics of care—one that recognises our interdependence.

Where Shabot helps us think about the structure of care, literature allows us to experience its ruptures. In the French novel by Eliette Abecassis, Un heureux événement, the birthing narrator is reduced to her medicalised, painful body. When she reaches out to the midwife for support, the midwife says: “I’d prefer that you not touch me.” The story becomes a scene of counter-hospitality: the hospital no longer welcomes—it rejects. That rejection, that inability to feel received in a place meant for care, echoes another idea in Shabot’s philosophy: the erasure of trauma. The narrator asks: why did no one explain what was happening? Why does such a foundational experience disappear so quickly? Perhaps this is why women rarely speak about it, or feel shame when they do.    

Other literary voices, like Annie Ernaux’s in L’Événement, remind us that the spaces of care—waiting rooms, clinics—are also spaces of encounter, fragile and revealing. Ernaux writes:

The waiting room is divided into two adjoining boxes. I chose the one closest to the doctor’s door, the one with the most people. I started correcting the papers I had brought. Just after me, a very young girl, blond, with long hair, handed in her number… Waiting already, seated far apart, were a man in his thirties, fashionably dressed, slightly balding; a young Black man with a Walkman; a man in his fifties… collapsed in his seat… Then a couple: she’s wearing shorts, visibly pregnant; he’s wearing a suit and tie.

If you know her novel about abortion before it was legal in France, you can see that this is not a dramatic or violent scene, but a moment of quiet observation—an ordinary wait that becomes, in Ernaux’s hands, a moment of existential intensity. Each body carries its own story, its own fear, its own inequality. The waiting room becomes more than a functional space; it becomes a human tableau, charged with emotion, proximity, and silence. Ernaux shows us that hospitality is not only about opening doors—it’s also about how we wait together. About whether there is space for recognition, for witnessing, for co-presence.

And this brings me, quite naturally, to the art gallery—the space we inhabited earlier. Like the hospital or the waiting room, the gallery is also an institution, framed by rules, protocols, and expectations. But it is also a space of genuine hospitality: a place that welcomes vulnerability, that receives not only artworks but also the emotions, memories, and traces of care that visitors bring with them.

In Pauline Keena’s work, I find precisely that kind of hospitality. Her art invites us in without judgment or instruction. It doesn’t tell us what to think or feel; it gives us space to feel. Each piece opens a quiet, generous encounter—with fragility, with tenderness, with what remains unsaid. Like Ernaux’s waiting room, Pauline’s installations are spaces of presence—where bodies, memories, and emotions coexist without hierarchy.

In that sense, Pauline’s work and the narrative medicine workshops I facilitate with healthcare professionals share something essential: both create spaces where listening, witnessing, and presence become acts of care. Both remind us that to welcome is not simply to open a door, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by what enters.

Perhaps that is the ethical and poetic task of all spaces of encounter—hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms, galleries: to host without preconception, to welcome what unsettles, what exceeds, what doesn’t fit. To accept not understanding everything, not controlling everything. To welcome ambiguity.

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Pauline’s art is not about something. It is the thing itself.
This is not representation. It is inscription.

Pauline’s practice builds through repetition: stitching, mending, packing, giving the work the years it needs. It is slow work, necessary work. “Proactive, embodied knowledge,” she calls it. Not knowledge as in a statement, but knowledge as in a practice of staying with what is otherwise unstayable. It recalls the laundries, the hidden stitching rooms of Irish history, it etches the past into our collective consciousness, but it also resonates with daily experiences of maternal loss.

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Her art refuses neat closure.

This is where the arts, I believe, do what no other domain can. Medicine diagnoses, law adjudicates, policy regulates. All of these are necessary. But only art creates conditions for us to remain with contradiction and ambiguity, to dwell in questions without rushing to answers, to hold loss without erasing it.

In narrative medicine workshops, we often say that stories do not stand next to care—they sit inside it. In clinics, as in classrooms, I have seen how a single page or a single object can shift everything: the gaze, the question, the sense of what matters. Pauline’s art extends this truth. It is not a supplement to care; it is care. It reminds us that attention itself is an ethical practice.

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Attention is our first instrument.
Art is a practice of care.
The clamps, the fabrics, the fragments of history that appear in Pauline’s work are not merely materials—they are carriers of memory. They recall the unseen, the unspoken, the gestures of care and endurance that persist across time. Pauline’s art listens to these traces, not to expose or accuse, but to transform them into spaces of remembrance, tenderness, and repair.

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Her art does the remembering.
It remembers with us, and sometimes for us.

This, too, links her work to Laurens’s, which insists on writing her son’s life which official documents abbreviated into DCD—deceased. A shorthand that erases. A shorthand that kills again. Laurens resists by expanding the abbreviation into story, into testimony, into insistence. Pauline resists by turning clamps into tapestry, fragments into fabric. Both works convert what remains into what can remain, into something we can return to, hold, and hold with. In the Medical Humanities, we often ask: how can the humanities contribute to health and care without being reduced to “communication tools” or “soft skills”? Pauline’s practice offers a clear answer. The arts are not accessories to justice; they are rehearsal rooms for it. They give us forms in which to test attention, practice recognition and sustain presence.

Art does not cure grief; it dignifies it.
Art does not erase the past; it gives the past a future.

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This is why I am grateful to be in dialogue with Pauline. As an academic, I measure time in grant cycles, in teaching loads, in research outputs. But Pauline’s “vague sensation of things” unsettles that rhythm. It reminds me that sensation precedes strategy, that the body registers what the mind cannot yet articulate, that grief demands not vision but presence.

And perhaps this is the most important lesson her work teaches us: that what remains—fragments, instruments, threads, sensations—can be the ground for making again. The work is not about closure, but about continuing. Not about explaining, but about holding. Not about the past, but about relation.

What is gone is not nothing.
What remains can be remade.
And what is remade can remake us.

https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/faculty-arts-humanities/our-people/lo-c-bourdeau