Photos: Ros Kavanagh. Courtesy of the artist & Butler Gallery
Butler Gallery is pleased to present I Took a Hammer in My Hand, a new installation of photographic works and sculpture by Northern Ireland-based artist Jan McCullough. Artworks in this exhibition explore the boundaries between amateur and professional; image and object; and photography’s role in looking, learning and representing collaborative labour.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from a DIY handbook, I Took a Hammer in My Hand: The Women’s Build It and Fix It Handbook, published by Florence Adams in 1973, which is part of the artists’ collection of DIY manuals. The book, equipped with detailed illustrations, provides tips and guides to aid the amateur DIY-er in repairing and fixing everyday domestic issues. It invites readers to learn through looking, an act that for the artist is deeply linked to the creation of the photographic image and the studies inherent to craftsmanship.
The exhibition includes Maquette (2025-26), a new series of framed photographs of hand-built wooden roof models. The models are made by male and female apprentice carpenters working across Ireland, then staged and photographed by the artist in front of handmade backdrops in the workshops and institutions where they were fabricated. These scaled roof models are the result of a standard learning exercise that encourages the student makers to develop and test a range of complex skills to translate two dimensional plans into three dimensional space. The Maquette series also alludes to a longer tradition of photographers going into sculptors’ studios and design workshops to stage their maquettes and assist in bringing the objects made with care in these interior testing spaces out into the world.
I Took a Hammer in My Hand also features Off Cut (2026), an assemblage of sculptures that reference wooden offcuts and wood shavings gathered from various workshop floors by the artist, and a sculptural partition draped in pigmented drop cloth that choreographs the gallery space.
In tandem with Maquette, these works subtly explore the ambiguity of the scaled-up, re-framed object. They invite you to navigate them, and the space and works around them, with your bodyand engage with their materiality. Several works in this exhibition were developed by Jan McCullough following her research residency at Butler Gallery in 2025, during which she became interested in the proximity of the gallery to nearby workshops like Kilkenny Design Workshops. McCullough had conversations with carpenters, former apprentices, and other makers that led to new collaborations which included sculptures made together with Waterford-based furniture maker David Carpendale. In addition, a pair of roof models, included in the Maquette series, were based on the distinctive roofs and architecture of the historical model village built for woodworkers and other manual labourers at nearby Talbot’s Inch, which were made by fabricators with a connection to Kilkenny.
I Took a Hammer in My Hand invites us to think about what exists within and outside of the frame
and consider that artworks are not made in isolation. Through focusing on the artist’s and fabricators’ acts of building, rebuilding and reframing, the exhibition celebrates overlooked, shared gestures of labour, skill and care that underpin the making process.
The artist
Jan McCullough is an artist from Northern Ireland. Her work explores the human acts of construction , fabrication and DIY, and the communities of interest and place that form around them
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Arts Council Ireland Project
Award, Kilkenny County Council and Creative Ireland.
See Butler Gallery website for information on public programming of events: Reading Room: I
Took a Hammer in My Hand taking place from 14th – 21st March, which is programmed in
partnership with the Tea Houses Kilkenny and Artist Talk on 9th April.
The artist wishes to thank the following whose contributions have been integral to the realisation
of this exhibition: Rachel Botha, Butler Gallery Team, Ed Dunne, Mark Geraghty, Alissa Kleist, Ruaidhri Lennon, Aaron Priestly, Goretti Priestly, Tyrone Priestly and Tea Houses Kilkenny.
With special thanks to Louise Anson, Artisan Frames Tipperary, ATU Letterfrack, CITB NI, David
Oliver Bespoke, Patricia Duffe, Dun Laoghaire Further Education Institute, Meadhbh Gurrin, David
Granville, Inspirational Arts Dublin, Kilkenny Archaeological Society, Eamonn Maxwell, Andy McCara, Sarah McCloy, Polly Minett, René Mullin, Orla Murphy, Sean Murphy, NIVAL National Irish Visual Arts Library, Cynthia O’Callaghan, Pat Phillips, QSS Belfast, Jessica Sampson, Ann Tierney and Women’s TEC Belfast.
Jan McCullough
I Took a Hammer in My Hand
Until May 3, 2026
