13 Days of Sheela Na Gig: International Women’s Day and Project Sheela

Since 2020, the anonymous artists behind Project Sheela have been making one-of-a-kind images of Sheela Na Gig and placing them at sites that have an important place in women’s history. March 8, International Women’s Day, is when Project Sheela starts tagging new sites.

The first site of 2024 is the former Jurys Hotel in Ballsbridge, Dublin. This is how Project Sheela explains their choice:

This site has been bought by the US government. They plan to build an expanded American Embassy here to the value of €641 million. Why are we allowing the US to expand their embassy in Ireland, while they are actively involved in an ongoing genocide…?

The US aids and abets Israel’s war crimes. They literally fund and manufacture the weapons that have killed over 30,000 innocent civilians, two thirds of which are women and children… You cannot call yourself a feminist if you do not stand with Palestine. The women of Palestine are losing their lives, their babies, their whole family, their homes, their possessions…

You can read the rest on their Instagram post, but here’s one more sentence that jumped out at me: “Women are giving birth with no medical assistance, no pain relief, no medication.”

As I say in the Spring issue of Croning, we will likely never know what Sheela Na Gig meant when medieval stone masons started carving her image into the walls of churches, castles, and other important structures, but one theory advanced by Barbara Freitag is that Sheela Na Gig served as a sort of guardian and even teaching tool for birthing women. Whether or not this was true in the past, it is certainly true now that contemporary women see Sheela this way—as midwife Mel Bailey writes in the zine. This is just one way that Sheela serves as an image of power today.

The work of Project Sheela is an act of reclamation. By marking sites where women have been disempowered, these artists are making a declaration of resistance, simultaneously honoring the women of the past and asserting a commitment to fight for a better future. The Croning Collective stands in solidarity with Project Sheela, and I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

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