Lyndsey McDougall’s main sources of musical inspiration are unconventional, to say the least.
Who would have thought Lily Yeats, WB Yeats’s lesser-known but equally talented embroiderer sister, would be the titular character of a 21st-century rock song?
Like Lily, McDougall has a penchant for the textile arts, a shared love that inspired her to memorialise the artist in the lyrics of her band’s debut album. Not only that, but one of Lily’s great embroidery projects, the Loughrea Cathedral banners, was central to McDougall’s PhD thesis.
Frontwoman and songwriter of the Belfast alt-punk band New Pagans by night, by day McDougall is an art history lecturer at Ulster University.
Trading the typical pangs of love and heartache for some feminist history, she wrote the song with her bandmate – and husband – Cahir O’Doherty.
[ Neglected reputations: The forgotten Yeats sisters, Lily and ElizabethOpens in new window ]
“That’s what I wanted to write. It wasn’t about love and romance: it was just about these interesting people,” McDougall says. “When I wrote the lyrics for Lily Yeats I was pregnant, and I noted in my head that I actually really wanted my kids, particularly if I had a daughter – which I did end up having – to know about the Yeats sisters.”
McDougall is preparing to present her research on the Loughrea Cathedral banners – 24 hand-stitched banners of Irish saints – as part of the Yeats Sisters Symposium this month.
Now in its third year, the symposium is a celebration of the lives and work of Lily (whose first name was actually Susan) and her creative partner and sister, Elizabeth. The programme for this year includes a lecture series, a watercolour workshop inspired by Elizabeth’s published art manuals, and a guided walking tour of local places that were central to the sisters’ lives and work.
In 1902, together with the suffragist and fellow artist Evelyn Gleeson, the pair established Dún Emer, a craft enterprise based in the south Dublin suburb of Dundrum. The symposium will take place in Taney Parish Centre, a stone’s throw from the site of their creative hub.
Dún Emer translates as the Fortress of Emer, after the wife of the mythological epic hero Cú Chulainn.
According to Irish mythology, Emer was renowned not only for her beauty and wit but also for her skill in needlework and aptitude for the domestic arts, making her a fitting namesake for the newly formed guild, which aimed “to find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things”.
From the beginning, Dún Emer and the later emerging Cuala Press endeavoured to have an exclusively female workforce; many of them started their training as teenagers.
Gleeson managed finances and led the weaving department; Lily and Elizabeth took charge of the embroidery and printing aspects of the business respectively. Lily had honed her embroidery skills through training at Kelmscott Manor in Hammersmith, London, under May Morris, the daughter of renowned British textile designer William Morris.
McDougall, whose paper was selected as part of the conference’s early-researcher platform, which allows undergraduate and postgraduate students to share their work, wanted to create music that would highlight the experiences of marginalised people.
“We had written a lot of songs about marginalised people, and one of those people was Lily Yeats. When we started the band I started writing songs, and I started learning about Lily at the same time, so it all kind of connected.”
She first heard of Lily and Elizabeth Yeats about a decade ago, while researching May Morris. “This is so frustrating that I don’t already know this, that it hasn’t been presented to me,” McDougall remembers thinking. “That’s not just an educational issue. I think it’s a societal issue – the untold stories of these fantastic Irish women ...
“I was mesmerised, really, and inspired, and thought there’s so much wonderful mining of this history to do. We have to go like detectives to try to get these narratives and stories that have been almost lost to history.”
For McDougall, the sisters and Gleeson created Dún Emer as a “space for other women using their crafts as tools of agency, to empower themselves ... I think more than ever we still need that message.”
Although they’re made by people who are artists in their own right, embroideries, unlike paintings, are rarely signed. Lily Yeats strayed from this – which has inspired McDougall to start marking her own work.
“I think that her signature on her embroidery is reflective of her being proud of it and taking authorship of it. In a way she’s taking ownership of that piece. That’s hers, and she’s putting her stamp on it.”
McDougall welcomes the “surge of interest” in the Yeats sisters over the past five years, which has been facilitated by archival initiatives such as Trinity College Dublin’s Cuala Press Project and by a documentary presented by the musician Imelda May.
“Certainly 20 years ago, when I was starting my studies, no one was talking about them,” McDougall says, adding that the conference’s “focus on tracing the impact of the sisters not just visually but culturally” is important.
Her interest in the ecclesiastical stems from a religious upbringing: growing up as a pastor’s daughter in Co Fermanagh, McDougall’s early appreciation of music was shaped by hymnal songs – for which she has a lasting love.
“In church, that’s where I would’ve learned to sing,” she says. “That was my initial understanding of music. There was no secular music in our house.”
Then, in Belfast, a sudden exposure to the grittiness of punk and rock’n’roll gripped her imagination.
“I remember being in my early 20s at art college and just being exposed to all this brand new, what we would have called secular music, outside of church music. I was, like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ My mind was blown. I was very new and green to that. From that moment on I just went to loads of gigs and surrounded myself with musicians. It was inevitable that I would end up in a band.”
McDougall now lives on the Ards Peninsula in Co Down with O’Doherty and their two children.
The name of their band – which also features Claire Miskimmin, Allan McGreevy and Conor McAuley – seems an act of quiet rebellion. For McDougall the Latin origins of the word “pagan”, meaning country dweller or outsider, resonated.
“I am fascinated by religion and by the Masonic order as well. I’m fascinated by these little groups of people that come together in some kind of community, around a shared belief or shared vision.”
The band’s first experience of touring was three weeks travelling across Europe supporting the British rock band Skunk Anansie, in 2022. “I think they were the first big band to leave the UK after lockdown, so it was a very strange tour but an amazing experience.”
The music industry is challenging for a small band such as theirs to navigate, she says. New Pagans have been on a break for about a year, but they’ve been mulling some new ideas and are “looking forward to creating again”.
Until then, McDougall is busy preparing for the Yeats Sisters Symposium – which, thanks to her graduation being the week before, comes with the bonus of being able to use her hard-earned doctoral title for the first time.
Lyndsey McDougall will talk about the Dún Emer Guild, the Loughrea Cathedral banners and Lily Yeats’s creative leadership in the Irish arts and crafts revival at the Yeats Sisters Symposium, at Taney Parish Centre in Dundrum, Dublin, on Saturday, July 12th
