CCI-newsletter-1987-63-May-August

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MAY — A U G U S T 1987

Crafts Council of Ireland Thomas Prior House Merrion Road Dublin 4

In May this year, the Crafts Council invited craftspeople to submit slides of their work for preliminary selection of exhibitions of Irish craftwork in New York and in Karlsruhe, West Germany. One hundred and seventy craftspeople submitted more than 700 slides and about eighty of these have been asked, as a result of the first selection, to make work for final selection in September. In an effort to obtain as representative a submission as possible, the Crafts Council wrote directly to approximately 700 people initially, and others were contacted through their guilds and associations. However, it is probable that some good work is absent from the slide collection (traditional musical instruments, for example, are not represented at all) and, as Brian Fallon comments in his article, the poor quality of many of the slides made consideration of some work virtually impossible. Marion Fitzgerald and Brian Fallon were invited to look at the slide submission and to write their impressions for the Newsletter.

The last number of months give the impression of a period when a lot of energy was generated in the world of Irish crafts. The CPSI exhibition was followed by the Jewellers' and Metalworkers' "Booty '87", and the opening of the "Burren 4" exhibition with a debate on the role of the critic in the arts was followed closely by the opening of the Cultural Relations Committee's "Crafts Ireland" at Kilmainham Royal Hospital. During the same time, an exhibition ofcontemporary glass was shown at the privately-owned Solomon Gallery. All of these events represent positive

SUMMER

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ISSUE

Articles by Aidan Dunne Brian Fallon Marion Fitzgerald Sean McCrum

moves within crafts in Ireland towards a new level and it seemed timely, therefore, to pose ourselves certain questions. By inviting four professional writers on the visual arts to write on some of the events taking place, an attempt has been made in this issue of the Newsletter to deal with concerns which all of us working within the crafts world have to confront in order to decide on future directions. That two of these writers have recently written independently and critically on crafts exhibitions in national newspapers is indicative of a level of interest among 'outsiders' which has been all too rare in the past. This in itself must be seen as encouraging.

The need to develop critical thinking and a critical vocabulary, the mutual dependance of creativity and craftsmanship, the need for individual crafts people to decide whether they wish to make objects which will supply an alternative to massproduction or to practise 'art' in 'crafts' media, the necessity to develop the confidence which will produce work which is fully-committed in scale and concept, the need to examine what we are doing in an international rather than a national context, the need for selectivity, both by the group and the individual: all of these raise their heads in this series of articles.

It is to be hoped that we on the 'inside', craftsmen and Crafts Council, can continue to generate the energy necessary to sustain this interest on the 'outside'. The sum of both, with healthy dialogue between the two, can create the strength which will give birth to the identity we have talked about for so long. Editor


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