I Took a Hammer in My Hand – Jan McCullough

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 body and 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.

About 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 - employing the materials and languages associated with these activities to create sculptural installations, interventions and photographs.

Selected solo and group exhibitions include those at RHA Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2025); Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2024); NOUA, Bodø, Norway (2023); The Complex, Dublin (2023); PS², Belfast (2022); Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2022); Freelands Gallery, London (2021); The Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Londonderry (2020); Czong Institute for Contemporary Arts, South Korea (2019) and Filter Space, Chicago (2018).

McCullough was an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and Light Work in Syracuse, New York (2020-2021) and has been the recipient of the Making and Momentum [In Conversation with Eileen Gray] Artist Prize, Ireland (2022) and nominated for The Golden Fleece Award, Dublin (2025); The Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize, Austria (2023); Platform at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2018); The Infinity Award at The International Centre of Photography, New York (2016) and The Deutsche Borse Photography Prize at The Photographers Gallery, London (2016). Her work is held in the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Light Work New York.