Year of craft highlights on tour
A number of the key exhibitions associated with 2011, the Year of Craft, will tour to new venues in early 2012. These include 21st Century Icons, a collection of torcs by contemporary makers curated by Ann Mulrooney of the National Craft Gallery, which will run at Rathfarnham Castle until 15 April 2012. The exhibition explores the historic adornment of the torc, an ancient status symbol, reinterpreted for the 21st century in a range of media. Inga Reed has drawn inspiration from the National Museum’s Bronze Age gold collection; Eily O’Connell from sheep’s wool fragments; Melissa Curry from the female warriors of Irish legend; Christina Brosnan from Celtic lunulas; Rachel McKnight from Tudor ruffs; Sam Hamilton from the ipod headphones; Laura McNamara from social networking; and Emma Bourke from tangled branches and tree roots. Modified Expression, an exhibition curated by Angela O’Kelly and showing the work of artists who manipulate books and paper, will show at Galway City Museum from December 2011 to May 2012. The exhibition includes calligraphic text, deconstructed books, intricately hand-cut paper, fibre manipulation and recycled and re-sculptured works by Denis Brown, Rebecca Coles, Ferry Staverman, and Thurle Wright among others. TransFORM, an exhibition of contemporary Irish ceramics by makers living in Ireland and abroad, will run at The Source, Thurles, Tipperary from 8 December to 27 January. The show, organized by Ceramics Ireland, includes the work of Tina Byrne, Nuala Creed, Jack Doherty, Sara Flynn, Peter Fulop, Deirdre Hawthorne, Jane Jermyn, Alison Kay, Christy Keeney, Marianne Klopp, Frances Lambe, Andrew Ludick, Gus Mableson, Michael Moore, Karen Morgan, Nuala O’Donovan, Laura O’Hagan, Mandy Parslow, Henry Pim, Neil Read, Elaine Riordan, Alex Scott, Eleanor Swan and Grainne Watts amongst others. Finally, the exhibition of winners from the National Craft Competition, having toured the country, will return to the RDS for a final showing during the National Craft and Design Fair, which runs in the RDS from 30 November – 4 December.

Stamp of success
Recently, An Post issued a stamp to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan. Also known as Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, O’Nolan is considered one of the great Irish humorous and satirical writers of the 20th century. Originally from Co Tyrone, he spent his working life in Dublin where he worked in the civil service, writing prolifically in his spare time. His first and most enduringly popular novel, At Swim Two Birds, was published in 1939. In 1940, he began writing the Cruiskeen Lawn column, as Myles na gCopaleen, for The Irish Times; it was humorous and bitingly satirical. However, he had to take early retirement from the civil service because politicians and civil servants objected to the way he was depicting them in his newspaper column. Brian O’Nolan died in 1966. The 55 cent stamp is based on a portrait by his brother, Micheál Ó Nualláin, and was designed by Steve Simpson. 7 stamp design by Steve Simpson and Portrait by Micheál Ó Nualláin

Source of inspiration
Source, an exhibition of contemporary craft, runs at County Hall, Dún Laoghaire from 3 – 27 February 2012. The exhibition, initiated by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, shows the work of both new and established craft makers who live in, work in, or are from Dún Laoghaire Rathdown area. The selection of two- and three-dimensional works is curated by Angela O’Kelly, a jewellery maker who has recently emerged as one of the most exciting curators in the country. The freshness with which she has approached craft curation in the past promises, in this instance, to bring original, innovative craftsmanship to a new audience. Ten new and established makers will exhibit, showing one-off pieces in glass, ceramics, metal and textiles. The established makers include Alison Kay, one of Ireland’s most skilled ceramic artists, Alex Scott, a maker of great experience whose sculptural ceramics seem to be evolving onto a new level of expression, Laura O’Hagan and Jane Groves. Emerging makers exhibiting in Source include Naomi Fry, working in glass, Ciara Harrison and Trudy Feighery, both working in textiles. Feighery’s work uses a combination of fabrics and technology, using digital embroidery techniques to warp and distort the fabric, creating surfaces in high relief, fluctuating in scale and pattern. Tara Ní Nualláin’s mixed-media textiles work is focused on themes of memory, social and familial traditions, using drawn and stitched maps and GPS co-ordinates to reinforce her underlying theme. Most recently she has made a series of mixed-media sculptures based on traditional road-side mile stones and referencing GPS tracking devices used in mobile phones

Deirdre McLoughlin at the National Craft Gallery
Shaping the Void, a solo show of work by the ceramic artist Deirdre McLoughlin, runs at the National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny from 20 January – 21 March 2012. McLoughlin, who has made her career in Holland, is a skilled and sophisticated artist, and the thinking behind her work is as clear as the forms of the pieces themselves. McLoughlin received a BA from Trinity College, Dublin in 1972, before travelling to Amsterdam, where Rosemary Andrews’ sculptures inspired her to begin working with clay. The Westerwald Prize in Germany in 2004 brought her sculpture to international attention and an invitation to New York to be included in an exhibition with Ruth Duckworth, Gordon Baldwin and Isamu Noguchi. The judges at Westerwaldpreis noted the balance and harmony of McLoughlin’s individual pieces, as well as the interplay between them. Additionally, ‘unspectacular and inconspicuous, there is the elegance of the material component, of the exquisite technique which also corresponds to the language of ideas: finest marble seems to have been used rather than clay, warmth and skin-like surfaces are to be found where unglazed surface defines spatial volume. Unpretentiously, nonsense is made of the ceramic discussion about vessel and sculpture’. A solo show in the Ulster Museum that afterwards travelled to Limerick City Gallery of Art and the Green on Red Gallery Dublin in the mid 1990s has been her only significant exposure in Ireland prior to this solo exhibition. 12 Deidre McLoughlin

The DAA and Irish sculpture
In a world of cut and paste, the Dublin Airport Authority, has stuck to their committment to Irish sculpture by, each year, commissioning an Irish artist to make a limited edition sculpture for the Allianz Business to Arts Awards. Over the past twenty years, this has given rise to an impressive body of work which not only documents the awards but also documents the evolving narrative of sculptural making in Ireland over the past two decades. Each year’s award is designed from scratch, by a different artist working in their own medium, but follows the same brief of reflecting the aspirations of the Allianz Business to Arts Awards, which applaud the mutually beneficial relationships and creative intereactions between art and business. The 2011 awards were presented this year by the Business to Arts Patron, President Mary McAleese. The trophies were designed and made by the Newtownards based wood-turner, Mark Hanvey. The awards, for the last twenty years, have been made by the following artists: 1991, Grace Weir, Starwheel (aluminium); 1992, Cathy Carman, Untitled (bronze); 1993, Felim Egan, Helix (metal); 1994, Cormac Boydell, Suibhne Séimh (ceramic); 1995, Marie Foley, Yew Mother (yew and ceramic); 1996, Dick Joynt, Polar Knight (limestone); 1997, Martina Galvin, Brzoza (glass); 1998 Linda Brunker, Breeze (bronze); 1999, Catherine Greene, Remnant (bronze); 2000, Deirdre Rogers, Creative Fusion (glass); 2001, Fiona Mulholland, Equilibrium (metal on stone base); 2002, Seamus Gill, Collaboration (silver); 2003, Raymond Kingham, Interface (ceramic); 2004, Natalie Delimata, Shared Space (copper wire and oak); 2005, Liam O’Neill, Dancers (Irish oak on redwood); 2006, Alva Gallagher, Tides (glass on marble base); 2007, Kevin O’Dwyer, Flight (limestone and silver); 2009, Cheryl Brown, Transition (bronze); 2010, Nuala O’Donovan, The Sum of its Parts (porcelain and perspex); and 2011, Mark Hanvey, Flux (bleached oak and maple).

Masterclasses at the Ulster Museum
The annual Masterclasses in the Applied Arts series at the Ulster Museum still represents the island’s clearest window to the international applied art scene. The programme follows a familiar format: six international artists, working in ceramics, silversmithing, jewellery, glass and print, give lectures at the Ulster Museum. The lectures, organized by Applied Arts Ulster, are free and open to the public, although booking is essential. The series began in October with Irish ceramicist Deirdre McLoughlin followed, in November, by the jewellery maker Cynthia Cousens. Paul Scott, an artist best known for his research into ceramics and print, and designer of thirty linear metres of the record-breaking Hanoi Mosaic Mural (2010) in Vietnam, will speak on 8 December, and the London-based jewellery maker, Mah Rana, whose work investigates the psychology and emotionality of how people invest in jewellery, on 9 February. The lecture on 23 February is by Colin Reid, who is regarded as a pioneer in the field of kiln-cast glass. His work, which often has hologramatic qualities, is often made to a large scale. Reid’s Cipher Stone, at over 500kg, is one of the largest artworks to have been cast in optical glass in the UK. Reid was recently awarded the People’s Prize at the 2010 British Glass Biennale for his Still Life with Books. The masterclass series concludes with a lecture by Kim Buck on 22 March.

Golden fleece award
The short-list for the annual Golden Fleece Award, now in its tenth anniversary year, will be announced in February 2012, prior to the award ceremony in March. The Golden Fleece has emerged as one of the foremost awards in the country, not least because it bridges the fine and the applied arts. Its brief is to help Irish artists of creative excellence and innovative talent, working in all the traditional arts and crafts, needing support at strategic stages in their careers. The award was established as a charitable bequest by the late Lillias Mitchell (1916-2000). Best known in Dublin as founder of the Weaving Department in the National College of Art and Design, Mitchell is also known for her research into the heritage of spinning, weaving, and dyeing in Ireland. The Golden Fleece Award, first made in 2002, has paid out some €200,000 in bursaries over the last ten years. The 2011 award winner, Gwen Wilkinson, the first winner working in photography, used the funding she received to buy specialist equipment. Wilkinson’s work involves resurrecting the historic photographic medium of wet-plate collodion. It is a difficult and labour intensive process, but the images that its creates have a
particular quality that other techniques cannot match. Wilkinson has made haunting images of ruinous buildings in the Co Wexford landscape. Wilkinson says. ‘As a photographic process it was abandoned and forgotten just as many of the structures in this project have been. Participation in the field of wet collodion not only helps to preserve knowledge of the past, but also helps to carry some of photography’s best attributes into the future.’

New design collective in Dublin
The new Irish design collective, Project 51, is based in a building that combines studio space, exhibition space, and a shop. The group and their work can be found on Dublin’s South William Street – an area that shows signs of becoming the city’s design quarter. The collective incorporates a variety of design disciplines with an emphasis, at least on the retail side, on the wearable. The idea of Irish fashion designers selling directly to the public as part of a collective is a welcome one, and the shop has a flavour that combines high-end and back street in their selection of clothes, jewellery, millinery, and accessories. The designers, and the atmosphere, are mostly young but by no means unknown. Anna Vahey’s collection of handmade leather bags, for example, won the Best Product Award at Showcase 2009 and Eily O’Connell’s jewellery, which often has the appearance of having been unearthed during an archaeological dig, will be known to most. O’Connell’s work is based on found objects – berries, bark, twigs, crab claws – which she combines with wax to create what she calls hybrids. These strange objects are then cast in silver, and combined with precious and semi-precious stones, or sometimes glass. The collective is the initiative of the jeweller Eoin McDonnell, and current members include: Anna Vahey, Caoimhe Keane, Claire O’Connor, Eily O’Connell, Emma Taylor, Geraldine Murphy, Heather Finn, Jennifer Rothwell, Martha Lynn, Sinead Doyle, Sinead Clarke, Vikki Shorten, Yvonne Ryan and Lisa Ryder whose recent series of patterned printed textiles are based on Russian dolls.

Irish Makers at Ceramic Art London
Ceramic Art London, the annual selling fair for contemporary studio ceramics, takes place at the Royal College of Art, from 24-26 February 2012. Four Irish makers are among the seventy-five ceramic artists selected for the event, which includes a programme of talks, demonstrations and films relating to studio ceramics. The differences within their work mark the diversity within ceramic practice in Ireland. Sara Flynn makes porcelain vessels, thrown and altered, using the vessel form to explore issues of containment, the relationship between exterior and interior, and the juxtaposition of pieces in relation to each other. Mandy Parslow’s work is also wheel-thrown, but here the similarity ends. Made in a grogged clay, which gives them a textured
quality, her vessels are salt-fired in a wood-fuelled kiln. ‘This unpredictable firing technique produces a colour palette which echos the agricultural landscape,’ she says, ‘Each piece is both caressed and assaulted by the flame, ash and salt vapour moving through the kiln in the intense heat of the firing. The surface quality and colours are a frozen record of this kiln journey.’ Derek Wilson’s sculptural pieces also use the wheel as a starting point, but have left the vessel form behind in favour of minimalist abstract forms, while Nuala O’Donovan makes complex hand-built pieces, slowly constructed from individual porcelain elements and fired a number of times during the making process. Her work relates to the regular patterns found in nature, interpreted through the geometry of fractal forms. ‘The history behind a scarred or broken surface fascinates me,’ she says. ‘The finished forms are a result of an intuitive response to the direction that the pattern takes as well as the irregularity in the handmade elements of the pattern.’

Bernstroff Collection at Rathfarnham Castle
The Berkeley Costume and Toy Collection has recently opened at Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, where it will run for the next ten years. Taken from the personal collection of Countess Ann Griffin Bernstorff, the selection includes costumes, dolls, and toys from the 18th and 19th centuries. Historic dress collections are rare in Ireland. Few survive and fewer still are on public display. But, as the dress and textile historian Hilary O’Kelly commented, looking at old clothes is a popular way of engaging with the past. ‘Historic dress is of very wide interest. It is attractive, engaging and curious. Ireland has few examples of what people wore partly because historically dress was not valued by museum curators. Dress suffered from being seen as too intimate and ephemeral, qualities that by contrast now attract both public and scholars to the subject.’ The Bernstorff collection will run concurrently to the ongoing exhibition programme.

Handcrafted Christmas
There are many reasons to buy craft for Christmas: the rejection of abject consumerism, the desire to support our own, and the search for objects that communicate a sense of meaning. The National Craft and Design Fair, which will run in the main hall of the RDS until 4 December 2011, will include many works that express these qualities. ‘People are looking for something worthwhile,’ the woodturner Roger Bennett comments. ‘They are buying judiciously, buying Irish, and looking for lasting value.’ He will show a combination of bowls, jewellery, and wall-hung work finely turned in wood and inset with elements of silver. Inga Reed, whose Seed Head Brooch featured on the 55 cent stamp series issued by An Post, 2011, will show a range of work that develops elements of the brooch into smaller pieces of jewellery: the silver and gold discs set within the brooch are treated separately to become stud-earrings.
Much of the hand-crafted Christmas offering is available near, if not on the, high-street. In the run-up to Christmas, the craft and design retailers on Cow’s Lane – including the jewellery studio and gallery of Debbie Paul – have expanded the principle of First Thursdays Dublin, in which galleries and creative spaces open their doors to the public on first Thursday of every month between 6pm and 8pm, include Thursdays 29 November and 6, 13, and 20 December. Adjacent to Kildare Village, Aviation Luggage a collection designed and made by Garvan de Bruir in Kildare Town, draws deeply on the local heritage of saddlery. De Bruir makes luggage and accessories that combine the stitching and materials of saddlery with the requirements of carry-on dimensions and the protection of laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

In Cork, jewellery outlet on Paul Street, IMB Design, has recently doubled in size, incorporating the next-door premises. The shop, previously selling handmade jewellery, made by the Kilkenny-based IMB Design team, led by the goldsmith Irene Brennan, has expanded to offer the work of the goldsmiths Irene Leahy and Oliver Healy, sculpture in bronze by Liam Butler, ceramics by Sinead Lough and Grainne Watts, and clocks made by Christopher Samuels in Cork. The Kinsale-based photographer Sheena Jolley is known for her detailed images of Irish wildlife and the way in which her use of close-ups create a sense of intimacy with her bird and animal subjects. Now, working in
collaboration with the goldsmith, Nicholas Wylde, she has launched the Wild Collection of silver pendants. The jewellery is based on Jolley’s photography translating her sense and presentation of the wildlife into a form that is both wearable and affordable. The designs include a puffin, swan, duck, Irish hare and seal and will be available at Sheena Jolley Photography on Kinsale’s Main Street.

‘Up North, A Christmas Trilogy’, the Craft and Design Collective's annual Christmas exhibition at Spacecraft, runs at the Fountain Centre, College Street, Belfast, until 28 January 2012. Following the familiar three-part format of framed works, three-dimensional pieces, and decorative season items, the display includes the ceramics of Adam Frew, work in glass by Alison Lowry and Catherine Keenan, textiles by Andrea Hayes, and jewellery by Garrett Mallon and Rachel McKnight. And in Co Down, the newly refurbished Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick, will show Celebrate! – a Christmas exhibition with ceramics by Alison Kay, Andrea Cashell, Deirdre Hawthorne, Helen Moore, Jane Jermyn, and Rory Shearer; glass by Alison Lowry, Alva Gallagher and Catherine Keenan; jewellery and silversmithing by Garrett Mallon, Garvan Traynor, Nuala Jamison and Rachel McKnight; and textiles by Andrea Hayes, Nigel Cheney and Patricia Murphy. Celebrate! will run until 24 December 2011.