In my exploration of street art – its stripped-back palettes, directness, and emphasis on impact – I wanted to test pairing it with the visuals of religion within my existing retail discourse.

The Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart images are two references I wanted to evolve as they were so present in my childhood. These devotional images, once intended to inspire reverence and obedience, became hollow for many following a succession of scandals in the Irish Catholic Church, beginning in the 1990s with that of Bishop Eamon Casey.

In this work I have substituted Mary for a shop mannequin and armed her with handguns, giving her both a sense of agency and contradiction. She is positioned against the backdrop of a retail display – the word Sale partially hidden by her halo. This juxtaposition prompts multiple readings: is she selling guns, or buying them in a BOGOF promotion? Why are they turned inward, aimed at herself? Does this represent the historic violence of the Church against women? Is the immaculate heart, so often shown pierced with swords, here recast as a gunshot wound?

Equally, she might be read through the lens of cinema: the redeemer in a spaghetti western, taking revenge on the men who killed her boy. Or perhaps she remains a symbol of salvation, her contradictions unresolved, holding the tension between reverence and blasphemy. Or maybe she is reduced to the banal – simply redeeming coupons in-store. Or is this just another high street window display, introducing a new season of urban fast fashion?