Leaded Strand Lamp:Selected for Inclusion for an Exhibition of the best of irish Design as part of the Vernacular Exhibition in London Design Festival 2013. Curated by Ann Mulrooney

Contemporary product made using traditional Northern irish metal craft skills

TEXTILE TECHNOLOGIES IN CONCRETE ENVIRONMENTS."

Girli Concrete is a cross disciplinary funded research project based in the University of Ulster involving a textile designer/ researcher, an architect/ academic and a concrete manufacturing firm.
Girli Concrete brings together concrete and textile technologies, testing ideas of
concrete as textile and textile as structure. It challenges the perception of textiles as only the ‘dressing’ to structure and instead integrates textile technologies into the products of building products. Girli Concrete uses ‘low tech’ methods of wet and dry concrete casting in combination with ‘high tech’ textile methods using laser cutting, etching, flocking and digital printing. Whilst we have been inspired by recent print and imprint techniques in architectural cladding, Girli Concrete is generated within the depth of the concrete’s cement paste “skin”, bringing the trades and crafts of both industries together with innovative results.
Architecture and Textiles have an odd, somewhat unresolved relationship. Confined to a subservient role in architecture, textiles exist chiefly within the categories of soft furnishings and interior design. Girli Concrete aims to mainstream tactility in the production of built environment products, raising the human and environmental interface to the same specification level as the technical. This paper will chart:
The background and wider theoretical concerns to the project.
The development of Girli Concrete, highlighting the areas where craft becomes
art and art becomes science in the combination of textile and concrete
technologies.
The challenges of identifying funding to support such combination technologies,
working methods and philosophies.
The challenges of generating and sustaining practice within an academic
research environment
The outcomes to date

Weathering - Carvel Chair

Carvel Chair selected for inclusion in the DCCoI Weathering Exhibtiion at LDF14

As William Morris Said - Strand Lamps

Strand lamps selected for inclusion in this exhibition in the Ruthin Crafts Gallery

‘Reading Aran knitting: stitches, text andinterpretation’

The densely textured surfaces of Aran knitting seem to invite interpretation. They have been ‘read’ as identity documents, family trees, references to natural and spiritual phenomena, or even maps. This paper traces the search for meaning in Aran knitting, examining how these stitch patterns have been ‘read’ in the contexts of tourism, fine art and fashion. As Jo Turney (2013:55) argues, the idea of knitted textiles as communicative media in non-literate societies ‘consigns the garments to a preindustrial era of more rural and simple times’, situating them in an imagined state of ‘stasis’. Thus the ways in which Aran stitches are ‘read’ sometimes obscure the processes through which they are ‘written’, whether in terms of individual authorship and creativity, or in terms of their manufacture. Regardless of the historical veracity of claims that particular Aran stitch patterns index features of the social, natural or spiritual worlds, analysing the ways they have been ‘read’ in the context of comparable textile traditions, other crafts which have taken on ‘heritage’ souvenir status, and Irish national identity, reveals how Aran knitting has performed broader communicative functions (see Sonja Andrew 2008), which continue to be subverted and elaborated by fine artists, and translated into couture and mass market fashion products.

The Aran jumper: Crafting a Transatlantic Heritage

The garment we now recognise as the Aran jumper emerged as an international symbol of Ireland from the twin twentieth century transatlantic flows of migration and tourism. Its power as a heritage object derives from: 1) the myth commonly associated with the object, in which the corpse of a drowned fisherman is identified and claimed by his family due to the stitch patterns of his jumper (Pádraig Ó Síochain 1962; Annette Lynch and Mitchell Strauss 2014); 2) the meanings attached to those stitch patterns, which have been read, for example, as genealogical records, representations of the natural landscape and references to Christian and pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ religion (Heinz Kiewe 1967; Catherine Nash 1996); and 3) booming popular interest in textile heritage on both sides of the Atlantic, fed by the reframing of domestic crafts such as knitting as privileged leisure pursuits (Rachel Maines 2009; Jo Turney 2009). The myth of the drowned fisherman plays into transatlantic migration narratives of loss and reclamation, promising a shared heritage that needs only to be decoded. The idea of the garment’s surface acting as text (or map) situates it within a preliterate idyll of romantic primitivism, while obscuring the circumstances of its manufacture. The contemporary resurgence in home textile production as recreation, mediated through transnational online networks, creates new markets for heritage textile products while attracting critical attention to the processes through which such objects, and mythologies, are produced. The Aran jumper’s associations with kinship, domesticity and national character make it a powerful tool in the promotion of ancestral (or genealogical) tourism, through marketing efforts such as The Gathering 2013. Nash’s (2010; 2014) work demonstrates the potential for such touristic encounters to disrupt and enrich public conceptions of heritage, belonging and relatedness. While the Aran jumper has been used to commodify a simplistic sense of mutuality between Ireland and north America, it carries complex transatlantic messages in both directions.