Desmond Burdon Art Prints

Desmond Burdon Art Prints Desmond Burdon shares his latest artwork of mixing various creative mediums with digital layering to

16/05/2026

An institution that claimed morality punished a child like this.

*Broken Teacup* exposes how cruelty was normalised inside the Magdalene Laundries as routine.

This is what unchecked authority does.

15/05/2026

An institution that claimed morality punished a child like this.

*Broken Teacup* exposes how cruelty was normalised inside the Magdalene Laundries as routine.

This is what unchecked authority does.

30/04/2026

The Magdalene Laundries operated through silence:

silence enforced, silence accepted, silence maintained long after the doors closed.

What unsettles isn’t only what was done to these women, but how deliberately their presence was removed in life, and again in death.

This image asks us to look at that removal. At who stands back. At who does the work. At what disappears.

—

**⚫️ Unmarked Graves / Quickly Cremated**

Digital collage

From *The Magdalene Laundries* series

by **Desmond Burdon**

29/04/2026

In 1993, at the High Park Magdalene Laundry in Drumcondra, Dublin, the remains of **155 women** were exhumed and cremated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge.

They were buried in unmarked graves.

Many had no death certificates.

The exhumation was carried out with minimal oversight.

The land was being cleared for sale to a property developer.

What followed was public outrage, not only because of the act itself, but because it revealed how completely these women had been erased in life *and* in death.

This work, *Unmarked Graves / Quickly Cremated*, responds to that erasure.

It is about more than what was done to the dead.

It is about what was taken from the living,

the right to know where a mother lay,

the right to grieve her properly,

the right to memory.

27/04/2026

They tried to erase them.

In 1993, a mass grave of 155 women was uncovered in Dublin,
connected to the Magdalene Laundries.

What happened next raised more questions than answers.

My piece “Unmarked Graves / Quickly Cremated” confronts that moment.

To make sure these women are not forgotten.

13/04/2026

This wasn’t charity. This wasn’t “care.”

This was **forced labour, identity erasure, and state-sanctioned abuse**, carried out quietly by the Irish Catholic Church, with government funding, until the **1990s**.

Girls were delivered by police and social services. They were turned into numbers. The convents profited and society looked away.

My work “Shaved & Numbered” exists because silence is how this system survived and I refuse to participate in that silence.

👉 If you want to hear directly from survivors, I strongly recommend the podcast “The Magdalenes and I” by .

Listening is the least we can do.

23/02/2026

I didn’t grow up hearing these stories.

The Magdalene Laundries operated in Ireland for centuries: places where women were confined, forced to work without pay, separated from their children, and often erased from public record.

For a long time, this history went unspoken.

That silence shaped how it was remembered (or better yet how it wasn’t).

This series came from learning late, sitting with that absence, and choosing not to look away.

I’ll be sharing more from *The Magdalene Laundries,* the **stories behind the images, and why remembering still matters.

“Baptised” from the Magdalene Laundry’s Series.A Nun towers above, emptying the contains of a chamber pot over a young m...
01/01/2026

“Baptised” from the Magdalene Laundry’s Series.
A Nun towers above, emptying the contains of a chamber pot over a young mother. Behind them, coloured light pours through stained glass, St John Baptising Christ in pure waters. Holiness becomes humiliation, baptism becodezecration.

“Shaved and Numbered” from the Magdalene series. See all images at desmondburdon.com
08/12/2025

“Shaved and Numbered” from the Magdalene series. See all images at desmondburdon.com

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