Standard Setters: Sonja Landweer Prizing Craft
Eleanor Flegg discusses the work of Sonya Landweer, chosen by a panel of experts on behalf of the Crafts Council of Ireland to acknowledge consistency in design excellence

As an island people we have always been somewhat dependent on ideas from across the sea. The current healthy state of Irish applied arts – green and growing – owes much to a wave of European talent that arrived in the 1960s and, happily, stayed. This influx of new talent has helped create the industry we have today.
One of these travelling artists, Sonja Landweer, arrived with ideas that seem advanced in the 21st century.

Forty years ago they were unheard of. In her homeland of Holland they were nothing new. Both ceramics and jewellery have long been considered legitimate art forms in Europe. In Japan, a ceramicist is more highly regarded than a painter or sculptor. In contrast Ireland had, and still clings to, outdated beliefs about both. Landweer entered a world where ceramics were limited to tablewear; where jewellery was made from gold and silver and precious stones. Neither was considered art. She became a path-finder. In both jewellery and ceramics she blazed trails that have since become well-trodden paths. She was the first ceramicist to exhibit in a fine art gallery; one of the first members of the Aosdána.

In 1982 Seamus Heaney wrote of her ceramics that: ‘It is useless to give word pictures of her work, its fluent marriages of glazes, its suggestions of the afterlife of earth, fire and vegetation, its shapes at one place charged like a fattening seed, at another place in full and delicate flower. Each piece is a sculptural form in its own right, the result of a unique creative action. It has been invested with inner hopes and blessings, insists on its own individuality, its own space, and stands free and declares itself simply and irrefutably as a work of art.’

In jewellery, a parallel art form, Landweer developed a hunter-gatherer approach to materials. Each handmade bead was individually pierced and glazed, and suspended in the kiln on a ‘kind of prickly object’ for firing. She added beads yew wood to physically lighten her necklaces. Her repertoire expanded into leather, paper, slate, and bone. She worked with metals and horn, with straw, sisal, and clay, developing a penchant for making sculptural jewellery and body adornments out of otherwise worthless material. The creation of jewellery from unusual materials has been around in Holland since the 1960s. In Ireland it’s the antithesis of what we imagine jewellery to be. It still makes people look twice.

Landweer’s recent jewellery is inspired by a winter journey to Crete in the 1990s. ‘I was drawn by the skeletal remainder of plant life – leaving beautiful, often prickly, structures organised around empty spaces. I started to work with knotted monofilaments. In the last few years I have been adding large sequins and semi-precious stones.’ Her knotted jewellery surrounds the wearer with a glistening haze of colour. Some pieces are like shamanic artefacts; ceramic beads and feathers that seem laden with esoteric meaning. Others are like drifts of horse hair in the purest white. She plays with red felt, with sequins and feathers. Nothing is too ordinary to be lifted into a different context.

Landweer has evolved as an artist to the extent that it no longer seems relevant which medium she works in – jewellery or ceramic. She still likes to use simple processes. Her most recent work explores bronze and the magic of patination. Each step is an exploration. Connoisseurs of Landweer’s art anticpate the fruits of that journey. n