The Dun Emer Guild and the Loughrea Cathedral Banners: Lily Yeats’ Creative Leadership in the Irish Arts and Crafts Revival

This paper examines the pivotal role of Lily Yeats as Creative Director of the Dun Emer Guild’s hand embroidery department during the early twentieth century, with a focus on the production of ecclesiastical banners for Loughrea Cathedral (1903–1904). Drawing from archival research and object analysis, the study highlights how Yeats’ leadership exemplified the aspirations of the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement and the wider Irish cultural revival, promoting ideals of creative autonomy, healthy working conditions, and national identity through craft.
This presentation is drawn from my PhD thesis, Narratives of Agency and the Material Culture of Masonic and Religious Embroidery Made in Ireland, c.1760–2023: through Three Case Studies (2024). In the broader study, I explore how Irish women used embroidery to assert creative agency within historically restrictive social structures. The Dun Emer Guild forms the second of three case studies, situated between the analysis of 18th–19th-century Irish Masonic embroidery and the mid-20th-century work of the Tapestry Guild at St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast.
Through a close reading of the Dun Emer studio culture and Yeats’ design collaborations with figures such as Jack B. Yeats, Pamela Colman Smith, and Mary Cottenham Yeats (née White), this research reveals embroidery not merely as decorative work but as a powerful medium of cultural assertion and female leadership during the Irish Revival. It contributes to ongoing discussions about women’s roles in the arts, situating embroidery at the centre of Ireland’s material and cultural history.