The Seed, The Vessel, The Roots and All by New Pagans: A designed artefact uniting creative and scholarly practice in the re-imagining of feminist craft histories.

The Seed, The Vessel, The Roots and All (2021) is a research-led designed artefact that fuses creative and scholarly practice to explore feminist approaches to craft, design, and cultural leadership. Developed and led by Dr Lyndsey McDougall, the project extends her doctoral research on the Dun Emer Guild and Lily Yeats, reinterpreting early twentieth-century Irish craft histories through sound, design, and material production.
The album exists in both vinyl and digital forms, integrating musical composition, visual design, and artefactual making to interrogate how women’s creative labour has been historically represented and valued. Through archival research, material analysis, and composition, McDougall re-frames embroidery and collaborative making as acts of design authorship and creative agency.
The work’s originality lies in merging craft historiography with contemporary music and design practice, presenting the album itself as a performative research outcome. Its significance resides in recovering overlooked narratives of women’s cultural production and demonstrating how designed artefacts can function as scholarly argument. The project embodies an interdisciplinary methodology where design, making, and sound operate as critical tools for feminist re-visioning of art and design history.