The Design & Crafts Council Ireland’s David Shaw-Smith Legacy Award was established in 2022 to support Ireland’s leading craftworkers by funding an individual artist to undertake a new project. It is a fitting tribute to a towering figure in the history of modern craft in Ireland. The series of documentary films about crafts that Shaw-Smith and his wife, Sally, began making in the late 1970s ran to well over one hundred episodes and took over four decades to complete. Although many of the crafts they documented were already passing into memory, they encouraged the nation to see crafts not in terms of tradition and nostalgia but as living arts. The recipient of this year’s €5,000 award is the Dublin-based artist Peter Young, who works in stained glass.
Little is known of stained glass making in Ireland prior to the 18th century, but the updated and expanded edition of Shaw-Smith’s book Traditional Crafts of Ireland (2003) included a sizeable section on stained glass. This surveyed not just examples of the 19th- and 20th-century revivals, but also the best of contemporary work. It acknowledged Young as a key figure in the revitalisation of the medium that flowered in the 1980s and continued into the new millennium.
Young is known for his magical, figurative, highly atmospheric designs. Animals, insects and fantastic beasts, celestial and childlike figures, gardens, skies and seascapes have been consistent features, no matter the subject or scale of his windows.
Extending his interest in nature and folk culture, Young’s winning proposal, entitled ‘Drawing Rain’, focuses on the Irish weather. Taking inspiration from the late Manchán Magan’s book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) (2025), Young will travel to Connemara, Inis Mór and Oileán Thoraí to capture through drawing the various kinds of rain documented by Magan. These will be developed into ‘full-scale designs and reinterpreted in glass using experimental acid-etching and painting techniques applied to mouth-blown glass’. The results, Young hopes, will show us again that stained glass is a living art and not a dying craft.
Joseph McBrinn
