IRISH CRAFT:Forget chunky knits, crocheted tea cosies and hairy wall hangings – Irish crafts are hot property abroad for collectors and galleries. ELEANOR FLEGGlooks at the trailblazers in Irish craft and, with GEMMA TIPTON, profiles the artists bringing the tradition into the 21st century
TRADITION HAS IT that craft does well in a recession, but the current blossoming of Irish craft has roots that go far deeper than the present economic circumstances. This summer’s array of craft events and exhibitions is a prelude to 2011, which the Crafts Council of Ireland has designated as Year of Craft. During the year, Ireland will host the Annual General Assembly of the European arm of the World Crafts Council.
This is, in a sense, the culmination of a 40-year love affair with craft. The romance began in 1970, when the World Crafts Council Conference met in Dublin. Apart from producing the native Canadian totem pole that adorned the bear pit in Dublin Zoo for many years, the event did not receive a great deal of publicity, but it was to have long-standing repercussions, including the formation of the Crafts Council of Ireland in 1971.
At that time, Irish craft was at a crossroads. Contemporary studio craft – where craft practice becomes an expressive art medium – hadn’t really gathered momentum, and many traditional crafts were dying out. Not even the stalwart efforts of the Country Shop on Stephen’s Green, which brought traditional rural crafts to a Dublin market, could stem the tide of modernisation.
David Shaw-Smith’s much-loved documentary series, Hands, first shown on RTÉ in 1978, focused on disappearing craft practices, such as spinning and hand-weaving.
“Making Hands gave me a connection with the craftspeople,” Shaw-Smith says. “Any documentary-maker worth their salt becomes emotionally involved with the person that they are filming. Perhaps it puts them at a different level than a purely mechanical exploration of a craft, where you see the things being made. There’s a humanity to the films where the personality of the person and their story is as important as the craft.”
Although most of the Hands films record craft as part of a passing way of life, others show that craft activity in Ireland was beginning to show fresh green shoots. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of art-school graduates from England, Europe and, almost equally exotically, Dublin, moved to the west of Ireland in search of a better life and set up craft workshops in the beautiful landscape. The studio crafts movement was multicultural long before we had even heard of the term, and west Cork was particularly popular.
“The whole thing was that you could come and be yourself and do whatever you want,” says ceramist Etain Hickey, who moved to Rossmore, in west Cork, in 1980. “It was also about being able to buy something incredibly cheap – all the craftspeople who moved in lived on half nothing.”
Property prices were low and craftspeople were often eligible for the government system of grants for small industry. This created the delicious irony that many of those who moved west in search of an alternative lifestyle did so with State sponsorship.
At first, the settlers made genuine Irish souvenirs to sell to tourists, but they brought with them a wealth of skills and knowledge of contemporary craft practices that were to be hugely influential. Irish graduates from the new ceramics courses in Limerick and Cork soon added an element of native talent to the mix.
Amid the wobbly pots and hairy wall-hangings, some very fine work was produced. Craft boomed to the extent that, whereas in 1970 there were reputedly five potters in Ireland, by 1985 you could scarcely throw a stone in west Cork without hitting one.
Quite separately to the alternative movement, the Kilkenny Design Workshops (KDW), the world’s first State-sponsored design agency, was formed in 1963. The KDW was never intended to stimulate craft; its remit was to improve the standard of Irish design for export. But since much of Irish industry was then craft-based – textiles, ceramics and furniture – the early efforts of the KDW focused on these sectors. Talented young designers were cherry-picked from degree shows all over Europe and brought in on short-term contracts to work with Irish industries and to train local apprentices. The synthesis of creative energies, coming into the relative cultural stagnation of 1960s Ireland, made Kilkenny a very special place.
Jack Doherty, a ceramics graduate from Northern Ireland, remembers receiving the call inviting him to work at the KDW. “I considered the proposal for several minutes before saying yes,” he says. “The Kilkenny Design Workshops were very different to anything else that was happening in Ireland. They opened a door to the network of international design.” Doherty remembers working with Irish sculptor Oisín Kelly, often described as philosopher-in-residence to the KDW. “He was making statues for churches at the time, but some of the churches didn’t have the money to pay for bronze, so I made the statues for him in ceramic, and he would paint them. It was like a moonlighting ceramic business.”
Many of those who came to Kilkenny as designers stayed in the area, establishing their own independent workshops. As the city and its environs became known as a “good place for craft”, more followed suit. Some of the stalwarts of Irish craft stem from this time. Simon Pearce, who set up his glassblowing workshop in Bennettsbridge in 1971, tuned into the Kilkenny zeitgeist, as did Nicholas Mosse, one of the few potters in Ireland to have made a commercial success out of functional ceramics. Quite apart from the joys of living within a creative-craft community, the KDW offered a solid retail outlet through the Kilkenny shops in Dublin and Kilkenny.
The loss of the KDW in 1988 was somewhat cushioned by the rise of the Crafts Council of Ireland. The World Crafts Council, Europe, had met in Ireland in 1983 and its associated activities gave the crafts movement another boost. Under the visionary directorship of Terry Kelly between 1987 and 1991, the Crafts Council’s HQ Gallery in Dublin’s Powerscourt Townhouse Centre offered an exhibition space for makers who were pushing craft practices beyond the perceived Irish norm. Mairead McAnallen, as director of the gallery, remembers the challenges of suspending traditional Irish boats from the ceiling of the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre: “We wanted to shake things up a bit – we weren’t afraid of being controversial.”
By 2000, when the National Craft Gallery opened in Kilkenny, Irish work in many craft media, especially silver and turned wood, was considered to have reached international gallery standards. However, much of the best Irish craftwork is sold abroad, through international galleries. The tentative beginnings of an Irish craft gallery network have been all but stamped out by the recession, and Irish collectors have yet to grasp the opportunity that they have at their finger-tips.
While craft, even at the highest end, is much cheaper than fine art, it is still not part of our culture to pay substantial sums for objects that relate to traditional or functional forms. But, at this end of the spectrum, the crafts intersect with fine art to create objects that are aesthetically beautiful, emotionally transformative, and philosophically challenging. They can make you see the world and your position in it in a whole new way.
The Hands series is available on DVD from irelandstraditionalcrafts.com
ALVA GALLAGHER
TRYING TO HOLD the feeling of wonder, the sense of vastness and beauty she gets from the sea, is what inspires Alva Gallagher. Water is a huge influence on this glass artist, who studied at Dublin's NCAD: "I was born and bred in Killybegs [in Co Donegal], so it can't not be, I was surrounded."
Gallagher was taught to dive by her mother, while still in her teens, and water is where she is in her element. "Any diver will tell you, when you're in the water, you can't always see what's around you. You have to hold your nerve."
This sense of mystery comes out in her work: large wave forms, enormous pearl-bearing oysters, glass shapes in which text floats and glows between the layers. "We don't know what's under the water," she continues. "There are so many things that haven't been seen or explored.
"I always wanted to be a sculptor. When I was a teenager I wanted to be an ice sculptor." Then, at NCAD, Gallagher "found the furnace – it glowed at me, and that was me, hooked". The seeming delicacy of glass belies the sheer physicality of working with it. Furnaces and kilns are heated to more than 1,000 degrees, and a piece will remain in the kiln for two weeks, or more. "You cannot open that kiln door until the last day. You could be five degrees out and the thing would be in pieces. It keeps you on your toes."
At a certain point, the glass itself "tells you what to do", says Gallagher, who is also fascinated by the connections between water and glass. "With water, it's always moving, unless you freeze it, but with glass you can catch that movement. With my pieces, it's like having a frozen piece of water that's standing up, like a surge." alvagallagher.com
GT
DEIRDRE McCRORY, MICHAEL McCRORY, CARA MURPHY
NORTHERN IRELAND HAS produced more than its fair share of skilled metalworkers, among them the extraordinary McCrory family.
Michael McCrory, a silversmith of international reputation, is married to the enameller and printmaker Deirdre McCrory. Their daughter, Cara Murphy, is also a talented and well-established silversmith. All three have work in national-museum collections, which is probably the most lasting stamp of quality that a craftsperson can achieve.
Like most contemporary silversmiths, Cara and Michael work mainly to commission – silver is an expensive material and the outlay of making a piece that will take months of delicate and painstaking work is not undertaken lightly. Although they work with the skills and tools silversmiths have used for millennia, they combine these with 21st-century technology. Commissioning is a two-way process and communication between artist and patron is made much easier by the use of computer design programmes that silversmiths can use to show the client how the finished piece will look.
Michael is particularly well known for the "prickly pear" surface finish he uses to texture the surfaces of teapots and pepper canisters. The silver is raised in points, much like the eponymous cactus, and slightly roughened. This challenges the conception of the shininess of silver and has the practical value of repelling fingerprints.
Deirdre, the only one of the trio who is not a silversmith, uses metals in subtle and inventive ways, often including foils and wires within an enamelled surface. Her plant-based imagery is expressed in a variety of printmaking processes including etching, enamelling, and photo-intaglio and, departing from the traditional image of the solitary craftsperson, she works in the busy and stimulating environment of Seacourt Print Workshop in Bangor, Co Down. Deirdre is currently working on an enamel element for a high-profile commission Cara recently received from the Silver Trust for Downing Street. Cara, assisted by a Major Individual Artist award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, is completing a piece that will eventually sit on the British prime minister's desk, holding pens, a clock, paper, and a blotter. The enamelled element of the silver work will be green – a gentle reminder that the blotter was made by a Northern Irish artist.
Prices for work by Cara and Michael are from £700; Deirdre's work starts at £130. deirdremccrory.com, michaelmccrory.com, caramurphy.com
EF
ANGELA O'KELLY
'I HAVE KIND of a split personality," says jeweller Angela O'Kelly. "I make all these lovely, really plain, black and white pieces, with simple lines, but then I go a bit mad with limes and greens and pinks."
Drawn from nature, her neckpieces, brooches, bracelets and armpieces are textured, fun, fascinating and almost organic in feel. Combining materials including paper, fabric, plastic, gold and silver, O'Kelly treats everything she uses as "precious", even newspaper, which she may put together with gold and platinum.
This is not the type of jewellery you just put in a box after wearing. O'Kelly's work is all about display: on yourself, but also on a wall, plinth or mantelpiece. "They're mini sculptures, when you're not wearing them," she laughs.
Wanting initially to be a silversmith, O'Kelly, who trained in Edinburgh, was torn between textiles and silver, so in the end she followed her instincts, and became, as she describes it, "a jeweller who works with textiles".
O'Kelly's creations come both from a fascination for and experimentation with materials (including DIY shop discoveries), and a love of the natural world.
"I spent some time in the Orkney islands, and the seaweed there was fabulous, with amazing, gorgeous colours, and that's where lots of the 'hairy' pieces came from. Then there are rock formations, simple line structures, barks of trees."
Ideas become doodles on paper, then 3D models and maquettes. Thus, O'Kelly will "figure out what I'm doing" before finally making the pieces in her own workshop. "It's a thrill when you see someone really nice walking round with your neckpiece on," she says, adding that she's never met anyone "not nice" wearing her work.
O'Kelly's passion for craft has also led to her curating exhibitions, and she believes craft is undergoing a resurgence: "People are starting to treasure individual items more."
angelaokelly.com
GT
FRANCES LAMBE
MANY PEOPLE JUST aren't used to having ceramic art around the house but Frances Lambe's ceramic sculptures are particularly easy to display.
Sitting easily on a shelf or mantelpiece, not drawing attention to themselves, they are as mesmerically beautiful as weathered rocks on the seashore. The pieces are handbuilt from clay and then polished to an unglazed sheen. It's a laborious process – the polishing of a single piece can take a number of days – and the patterning process is almost as time-consuming.
Many of the pieces are decorated with a pattern of pinhole perforations that break through the surface of the ceramic shell, highlighting their hollowness. Lambe is a diver, and her underwater adventures inform her work, but so do diving charts, sundials, and the way we use maps to make sense of the world.
Having worked quietly in her Dundalk studio for years without a great deal of public exposure, Lambe has had a busy year.
Following a successful solo show touring the country, her work attracted the attention of international galleries when it sold out at the Crafts Council of Ireland's National Craft Gallery stand at Collect at London's Saatchi Gallery in May.
But, although the world seems to have discovered her, Lambe is still absorbed in the journey of working with clay. "Doing the solo show helped me delve deep into the language of ceramics," she says. "The show gave me the opportunity to create a complete body of work and to face the challenge of making it cohesive – it was almost like being a musician and working on variations on a theme."
Prices start at €500, with smaller, accessible pieces available from Louth Craftmark at Drogheda's Highlanes Gallery.
franceslambe.com, louthcraftmark.com
EF
JOE HOGAN
IRISH BASKETS, which are different to those made anywhere else in the world, are deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness. Some, like the simple log basket, have a practical usage. Others, like the skib (the basket traditionally used to drain and serve the family spud) have effortlessly translated themselves into art objects.
A nicely made skib will look well as a wall-hung object – suspend it slightly away from the wall and the willow lattice does wonderful things with shadows.
Joe Hogan, who has been making baskets on the shores of Lough Nafooey since 1978, continues to make functional baskets in indigenous styles but, over the last 10 years, he has become known for his non-functional baskets – the most recent of which are built around oddly shaped branches, knots of bog oak and myrtle, which he has collected over the years. Some are closed forms, with the basket forming a pod around a fragment of timber. "With the functional pieces, I have a clear idea before I ever pick up a rod," he says. "With the non-functional, you can leave yourself a little bit more open."
They combine the natural strangeness of twisted, knotted wood with familiar techniques that have been used for generations. Hogan is preparing for a solo show in Edinburgh's Scottish Gallery and is participating in Material Poetry, a forthcoming exhibition of Irish craft at the American Historical Society, New York, but he is wary of the emphasis on innovation in the contemporary craft movement.
"The difference between something that's very good and something that's okay might be very slight – a thin little thing in the finish. I think that when people focus too much on innovation, they're missing that – they're seeing the stuff that's obvious," he says.
Log baskets from Joe Hogan start at €100, but expect to pay from €150 for non-functional work. joehoganbaskets. com
EF