Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Ciara McGrattan 

BA [Hons] Costume Design

My name is Ciara, I am a British aspiring Costume Designer who has just finished my 4 years studying Design for Stage + Screen: Costume Design at IADT. My passion lies in the physical construction of garments from a range of periods.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

As part of my major project I chose to design Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. This play follows three groups, The Fairies, The Athenians, and The Mechanicals, on a night of magic and mischief in the forest outside the walls of Athens.
For the project, I designed all characters in the three groups, as well as making the full costume designed for the character of Titania, Queen of the Fairies.


The Maternal Role of Wendy Darling in J.M Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911)

My thesis: “The Maternal Role of Wendy Darling in J.M Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911)”, aims to examine the character of Wendy Darling in J.M Barrie’s classic novel Peter and Wendy (1911). Throughout the novel there are prevalent themes of motherhood and a mother’s love, and we see Wendy fall into the role of a mother to the Lost Boys of Neverland. Through this dissertation I explored the role of Wendy in two avenues, firstly a historical/ sociological one, and then a psychological one. The first chapter focuses on Wendy’s role as a mother in relation to Edwardian culture, societal rules and expectations at the time, using Carol Dyhouse’s Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (2012) as my main source. The second chapter focuses on Carl Jung’s theory of Archetypes and Wendy’s role as a mother figure in relation to the Good Mother archetype, using Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (2015). This research concludes that Edwardian society and Jung’s mother archetype are contributing factors in Wendy Darling’s maternal role in Peter and Wendy (1911).