THESE two contrasting exhibitions in Kerry, of ceramics and weaving respectively, are linked together by the event Craic na Caoloige organised at Ballyferriter, and which has just ended. A series of week long workshops was organised there, centred at Louis Mulcahy's Potadoireacht na Caoloige, at which leading potters from several European countries gave demonstrations and lectures to about 250 people, some of them students and others mature potters.
Masterworks A mounted at Siamsa Tire in Tralee, showed examples of their work, with a large extra section devoted to Mulcahy's own works. One of the strongest personalities was Joan Carillo Romero, a Spaniard who uses unusual, slightly Picasso like shapes and is a master of glazing with a distinctive "lustre" effect. The shapes themselves are rather angular and austere; the colours are contrastingly glowing and mysterious, almost phosphorescent. Another Spaniard, Antonio Cebas McBride, makes virtually a specialty of pots based on prehistoric designs, and using ancient firing processes. (He demonstrated these at Ballyferriter by burying his unfired pottery in a pit full of burning or smouldering wood, covered over by sawdust and earth which were left overnight).
The large plates of John Dunn had a shell like delicacy in their glazing, augmented by skilful control of a "cracking effect which produces an abstract web of lines. Mulcahy himself emerges as a characterful, highly versatile maker of vases, pots, plates, etc. with an inventive and distinctive sense of decoration; one large standing piece from 1985 was particularly striking. He ranges from intimate domestic ware to large standing works, but personally I admire him most on a big scale, when he achieves a monumental, quasi primitive, almost "heroic" quality. Certainly he is one of the central and most consistently creative figures in the live area of Irish crafts. A pity, therefore, that this arresting, off the beaten track exhibition could not have run for at least another week.
Masterworks II, is mounted in The Weavers' Shop in Dingle and is subtitled Surface Tension. It is not an ideal venue (the exhibition space in Tralee is a very good one) and Lisbeth Mulcahy's impressive, relatively large hanging pieces suffer somewhat from cramped placing; ideally they should be hung higher and with more space around them. Muriel Beckett's almost virtuoso range of effects do come over fully, however, and Angela Forte is arresting and unorthodox.
This is a varied, personable show, though at one extreme there are some small, precious, self conscious works which appear to claim more than they achieve, and at the other extreme, certain of the exhibitors aim at effects which seem to me essentially pictorial and do not genuinely exploit the medium. What it does demonstrate, and unarguably, is that woven tapestry can be exploited as a dynamic, versatile medium, well able to cope with modernist images and/or a range of contrasting personalities and techniques.
