Contemporary Ceramics at Collins Barracks
Irish Contemporary Ceramics was founded in 1995 to promote ceramic art in a sculptural sense, promoting and encouraging non-utilitarian studio ceramics. The group's forthcoming exhibition, All Fired Up is their third national exhibition and the first to be hosted by the National Museum of Ireland. It includes the work of thirty-four artists whose preferred medium is fired clay. Some are Irish born, living at home and abroad, and others are international ceramic artists currently living in Ireland. The exhibition opens to the public from Saturday 10 March at The National Museum of Ireland – Decorative Arts & History, Collins Barracks, and will run until the end of August 2007. The artists exhibiting in All Fired Up are: Cormac Boydell, Bozena Chandogova, Jennifer Comber, Stefanie Dinkelbach, Isobel Egan, Clare Greene, Niamh Harte, Christy Keeney, Sonja Landweer, Ayelet Lalor, Nanette Ledwith, Andrew Livingstone, Dorothy Lordan, Caomh‡n Mac Con Iomaire, Jane McCormick, Deirdre McLoughlin, Ann McNulty, Peter Meanley, Michael Moore, Kathleen Moroney, Terry O'Farrell, Siobh‡n O'Malley, Henry Pim, Noreen Ramsay, Robert Rasmussen, Neil Read, Elaine Riordan, Beatrice Scott Stewart, Alex Scott, Peter Scroope, Brigitta Seck, Kathleen Standen, Katharine West, and Lisa Young.
 
Design Excellence at Showcase


Although the official response is still in process, Showcase at the RDS in January 2007 was anecdotally felt to show a marked improvement on previous years. There were more UK buyers and a strong European contingent showed a willingness to spend. 'There was an optimism about the show that I haven't seen for the last two or three years,' said Nicola Doran of the Crafts Council. 'The standard of the group stands had really improved. The reaction among the buyers was that Irish pottery was of interest again, and they were impressed with the quality of the textiles. It was also the first time that we've seen Korean buyers at Showcase.' As if to demonstrate a return to form in Irish ceramics, the Overall Best New Product of Showcase was won by The Potting Shed for a mixed media framed piece with individual tiles of hand-built ceramics, glazed to give the appearance of glass. Second place went to Neil Boyle Ceramics for his large and remarkable blue ceramic polar bear. Although there were pieces worthy of note throughout the show, the Source Aisle of makers handpicked by the Crafts Council continued to provide a useful focus. New makers on this aisle were Zac Phelan of Annascaul Pottery and the Dublin-based jeweller Debbie Paul who was also included in the Index Top 50 Awards.
Other makers showed work that has progressed significantly. Among them the jeweller Carol Fitzpatrick displayed an excellent piece that combined silver discs with a rubber neckpiece, while Cathy Prendergast of Inti Leathers showed a useful expansion of her handbag range which now includes some informal briefcases which retain the look of a handbag while being big enough to hold a file. Geraldine Murphy of Saba Jewellery exhibited a range of colourful pieces using freshwater pearls that have been dyed in purples, greens and reds, as well as a bracelet made of a string of silver elephants, linked trunk to tail. The silversmith Edward Cook of Waylands Forge had a new collection of silver spoons, while Kathleen McCormick of Basket Barn presented a stand with excellent use of colour. The Lifestyle Trend Area, curated for the Crafts Council by Anne Kennedy, and now in its second year, offers a link between the work of the craftspeople and the international world of trend forecasting. The stand followed two themes, Moody Blues and Eco-Chic, which were identified by trend forecaster Michelle Lamb as directions for 2007 and beyond. Avantcraft, the ongoing collaborative programme of craft and design, had a strong display with three participants winning awards from Index, the Top 50 new products of Showcase 2007. These were The Wild Goose Craft Studio, Silk and Felt Designs, and Geoffrey Healy Pottery. The West Cork Regional Brand, represented by the Fuchsia logo, made a successful first appearance at the show winning the Best Group Stand award as well as five inclusions in the Index Top 50: Adrian Wistreich of Kinsale Pottery for his collection of hand-worked salt and pepper sets in fine porcelain; Anke Herman for her Delisa bridal jewellery; Orla O'Rourke of Stable Door Pottery for her tableware; Kieran Higgins for his woodturning; and Hilary Nunan for her acrylic and natural fibre painting.
 
Interior Design at the RDS
In a culture that is growing more design-conscious by the day, interior design is no longer just about function; consider it more as a visually stimulating juxtaposition of objects, texture, and colour to complement structural layout and lighting. Following from the success of last year's event, Interior Design 07 promises to be, by a long stretch, the best interiors show in the country. The show, now in its third year, will run from 18–20 May. It will incorporate an additional hall of the RDS Main Hall Complex to allow for a greater selection of companies and products, and Hall C will be dedicated to the showing of contemporary art. Interior Design 07 promises to range the gamut of projected lifestyle trends and design-inspired statements, presenting new directions in lighting, fabrics, flooring, wallpaper, furniture, audio visual equipment, and home accessories. Although it is an event that targets industry professionals – interior designers, architects, specifiers, hoteliers, retailers, and developers – it is also open to the public. A series of talks on design will run as part of the show and prizes will be awarded as part of an overall commitment to the promotion and recognition of good design.
 
Design Award for OPW
This year's Bank of Ireland Opus Architecture and Construction Awards saw the introduction of a Wood Excellence Award for a design displaying excellence and ingenuity in design and execution. The Wood Award was made to the Marine Institute in Galway for its pragmatic use of timber, from furniture to acoustic walls and from panelling to flooring. The designers of the project were Architectural Services, OPW.
The Bank of Ireland, in association with the Institute of Designers in Ireland, has recently announced the IDI Bank of Ireland Graduate Design Awards 2006. Simon Rand won the overall award for a desktop printer that Derville Murphy, Group Architect and Art Curator for Bank of Ireland, described as 'a stylish desktop printer that challenges our preconceived ideas that technology should look as though its operation is complicated and be hidden under a desk'. Aine Kierans was Visual Communications winner; Sharon Ferguson was textile design winner; and Shiow Hui Yee was interior design winner. Ferguson has recently been accepted onto Portfolio, the register of the best designer/makers in Ireland.
 
Legge launches in london
Following his sell-out MA show, the young Irish designer Jonathan Legge has just launched his collection at the London gallery TwentyTwentyOne. The gallery owners, who saw an earlier edition of walking sticks at Legge's graduate show, were captivated by their sculptural beauty and sensitive design, and bought one of as a gift for the iconic British designer Robin Day, who is now in his nineties and uses it for walking around the garden. The walking sticks provide an interesting contradiction in urban, central London, though beyond their clear sculptural qualities they are intended for use both inside and outside the city. The walking sticks, essentially found objects, are scraped down, sanded, and cut to size. Then the tops are dipped in rubber and the ends are cast. 'For me, walking sticks are an unconscious product of a walk. Should you come upon a stick of suitable size, you often instinctively pick it up and allow it to become part of your walk. Sticks for me are these useless, useful objects that offer themselves up for endless applications or simply rest motionless as beautiful objects to be admired,' says Legge who originally graduated in furniture design from the Dublin Institute of Technology and was a founding member of the Irish design collective MASH.
 
Colin O'Dowd at Cologne Fair
Another innovative young Irish furniture designer, Colin O'Dowd is one of thirty young designers who have been sponsored to show pieces at the Cologne Furniture Fair 2007. He launched six new products at 100% Design 2006 and his furniture is now on sale at SCP Furniture, one of London's leading design stores. 'I keep my designs quite subtle and sensible, they're a bit Swedish in that respect, and some of the pieces have more than one function. Porter, for example, is a side table that doubles as a doorstop. Because they're simple, people can understand and relate to them, but there's also quite a bit of humour in them. It's all about having a knack for looking at familiar things and having ideas that can be turned into furniture.' Looking at people struggling to get up and down from a chaise longue inspired O'Dowd's design for the Plonk, a chaise longue with a missing central section that allows you to walk into it and sit down in comfort before you recline. 'I realised that when you're at home and you put your feet up on a coffee table the backs of your legs aren't supported but you're still perfectly comfortable.'
 
US Accolade for O'Dwyer
The silversmith Kevin O'Dwyer has been selected by Irish America Magazine as one of the 'Top 100 Irish Americans' for 2007. The magazine, which first compiled the 'Top 100' in 1985, honours people in a range of fields, and O'Dwyer is included for his contributions as an artist, and for his'involvement in arts and heritage projects in Ireland and the USA. O'Dwyer initiated the Lough Boora International Sculpture Symposium which won the prestigious Business2Arts Award in 2003. He now'directs Sculpture in the Parklands at Lough Boora, County Offaly, which was presented with the prestigious Best Art/Sculpture Award at the Local Government, City and Council Awards (LAMA) 2007. The LAMA awards were created to honour exemplary projects within the community. O'Dwyer was joined on stage by Tom Egan of Bord na M—na who has partnered this project since the Lough Boora International Sculpture Symposium in 2002. O'Dwyer said: 'This is another great tribute to the many artists, Bord na M—na employees, and sponsors who have supported this project over the past five years. We will continue to develop the programme with exciting new art work and the construction of a Visitor's Pavilion in the coming year.'
 
Spring Collections at DesignYard
DesignYard has work from an interesting selection of makers on display for springtime. These include Apple Tree by Liam Butler, a self-taught artist who made his living as a welder throughout the 1980s in the United States and recently returned to Ireland to work with copper, creating sculptural pieces based on natural forms. Brian McLoughlin works in bog oak, an ancient material, notoriously difficult to work, that tends to dictate the shape of the finished piece. Once a husk has been selected, its flaky outer shell must be removed. The shape below is cut and carved until the final form emerges and is completed by repeated sanding and polishing. Collectors of O'Loughlin's work include the President of Ireland Mary McAleese and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. The German-born jeweller, Friederike Behme, works in silver, gold, and occasionally platinum. As a child she recalls watching her father cutting gemstones and transforming them into beautiful carriers of light. The flair for stone cutting has carried on into Behme's own work, which combines many different types of stones: pearl, amethyst, turquoise, and diamonds, combined in a series of one-off pieces.
 
Frank Ryan travel Bursary
The Institute of Designers in Ireland has honoured one of its most distinguished founders and life long members with the establishment of the Frank Ryan Student Travel Bursary, formally launched by the Taoiseach, Mr Bertie Ahern TD, in February 2007. With a career spanning over sixty years, Ryan's abiding passion for designs was inspirational. He believed in the importance of promoting higher standards of design and professional practice. Ryan was a founding member of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design, and an adviser to Kilkenny Design, the Heritage Trust Exhibition, and ƒigse. He received many awards for his dedication to design including a Professional Excellence Award from Griffith College Dublin and Fellowships of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and the Chartered Society of Designers in the UK. The memorial bursary will fund design students who wish to pursue an international educational opportunity or a design project overseas by providing assistance to cover travel costs, housing costs, materials, and research.
 
New Dublin outlet for Angela O'Kelly
Angela O'Kelly's work crosses boundaries between sculpture, textile art and jewellery design. Working mainly in non-precious materials, she combines paper with fabric, felt, metal, and cord using a variety of textile and jewellery techniques, and produces two ranges: large sculptural wearable art pieces and a commercial range of neckpieces, brooches, and bangles. 'Inspiration derives from a fascination with simple shapes, textures, and repetition. It is taken from observing landscapes, boglands, rock formations, and sea life. Colour is very important, with earthy browns and greys, and vivid greens, blues and reds from the sea, featuring throughout my work. Texture is my main consideration, achieved by layering hard and soft fibres and knotting and sewing paper cord.' O'Kelly has recently found an Irish outlet for a new range of wall hung pieces in the new Eblana Gallery in Dublin – previously she has exhibited mainly in the UK and America. Some of these incorporate wearable elements, which can be removed from the piece, worn as a brooch, and then replaced. 'Even my wearable pieces tend to end up on display,' O'Kelly explained. 'The neckpieces look good on the wall when you're not wearing them, and some people mount the bangles on a plinth. The wall hung pieces were just a step on from there.'
 
Innovative Craft in Northern Ireland

Armagh and Down have the third highest concentration of skilled craftspeople working in the region, surpassed only by Dublin and Cork. The Seacourt Print Workshop, Bangor, is an artist print studio offering facilities for etching, relief, lithography, screenprinting, photo-intaglio, and other fine art printmaking processes.'The workshop caters for new and established artists, runs at least two regular exhibitions a year for its members, runs courses for everyone with an interest in printmaking, and seeks to make the art of printmaking more widely accessible through education and outreach. Seacourt has facilitated artists of the calibre of Helen Kerr, who works in batik and stitch to create wall hung pieces inspired by landscape, and Richard Croft who has used a variety of techniques throughout his career, including lithography, etching, screen and relief prints. Both now work full-time in the Lodge Studio, Dundrum. The sight of a thriving rural pottery is an increasingly rare one, but the Armagh/Down area has two examples, each with their own shop on site. The Eden Pottery, Millisle, produces reassuringly earthy ceramic tableware, hand thrown, and cheerily decorated using a cut sponge technique. Ballydougan Pottery, Gilford, produces a range of hand-thrown and decorated stoneware. Ards Crafts, situated within the Ards tourist office, provides an outlet for work of craftspeople like Irene McBride of Discovery Glass, a glass studio in Comber, and the jeweller Agnes Murnin, who was born in Hilltown, and graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 1994. True to her rural roots Murnin uses traditional textile techniques including knitting and crochet, which she reinterprets in sterling silver and nine carat gold wire. She has refined this technique to produce innovative one-off jewellery pieces, some with semi-precious stones, and others integrated with cultured and fresh water pearls. Her work attempts to create a juxtaposition of solid and void, delicacy and lightness, structured and sculptural.
 
Global Programme at the National Craft Gallery
The National Craft Gallery, Kilkenny will host a groundbreaking exhibition of Korean ceramics, from 12 March – 15 April. 'Tradition Transformed' assembles ninety works, dating from the 1990s to 2005, by thirty contemporary Korean artists such as An Sung Min and Lim Moo Keun. Korea has a long and complex tradition of ceramic art that goes back 5,000 years; the work exhibited both works within this and departs from it, showing new influences and innovative methods, the sheer variety of form highlighting just how vessel-obsessed Irish ceramics are. Also at the National Craft Gallery this spring is 'The Wild Geese: the Irish in America' (see our feature on page 124 of this edition). Curated by Kevin O'Dwyer, the exhibition will feature fine craft from across the Atlantic and run from 30 March – 26 May.
 
Enlightening Design
Launched by Anthony Cleary and Ina Koenig, Unleaded is a new Irish design company, currently specialising in lighting. Their most recent product, the 'Wing Thing', is a pendant light that fuses the patterning of antique lace with innovative lighting technology. A central lace arc is sandwiched between silica acrylic leaves which are suspended by a fine tension cable structure. This floating acrylic wing is up lit which projects an enlarged diffused lace shadow on the ceiling above. The interaction between light, lace, and shadow creates a piece with dramatic presence. The Paris-based Irish designer Killian O'Sullivan has also developed a range of graphic table lamps. 'It's basically a white lamp with a black drawing on an off-cylindrical base,' says O'Sullivan. The lamps have several variations inspired by, but not taken from, Matisse.
 
Brian Keaney wins Finnish design award
Every two years the University of Art and Design in Helsinki'(UIAH) presents the Ilmari Tapiovaara award to a person considered to have done special and creative work for the promotion of design culture in their field. This year the award has been given to the Irish-born designer Brian Keaney whose graduation work for the University of Art and Design, the WARM tea & coffee series, has become a design classic and known worldwide. After graduating in industrial design from the National College of Art and Design in 1996, he moved to Finland for further studies in 1998 and co-founded Tonfisk Design the following year. 'Its slogan – Form follows function doesn't mean all objects have to look the same – expresses 'the company's' philosophy of offering functional but creative products,' said Keaney. 'This is not just a personal desire but an economic reality if Tonfisk is to establish a market and compete internationally. Our production is in Helsinki with half of my time spent in production and the other half in sales, administration, and design.'
 
New Gallery for Kilkenny
The search for a venue that successfully combines studio and gallery space can be a challenging one, but the artists John Walsh and Colette O'Brien have found a suitable space in the spectacular landscape of north County Kilkenny. Their new venture, the Hillside Art Gallery will feature watercolour, oil, pen and ink drawings, mosaic, pottery, and sculpture. At present, they are working on a body of work to exhibit during Kilkenny Arts Festival this summer, of which their hand-made Venetian smalti (imported Italian tiles) will feature strongly. Walsh is a ceramicist who makes large scale pots, jugs and bowls along the lines of Grecian earthenware, which O'Brien then decorates in a mosaic fashion using the Venetian smalti. A variety of wall hung pieces will also be shown, while garden sculptures in the grounds of the studio work in conjunction with the landscape of Donoughmore.