KDW Press Clippings -Young Scientists Exhibition Letter by KDW Chairman W.H. Walsh

NIVAL/KWD/PC/03/02 - selected by Katie Blackwood

Throughout their existence, KDW kept an archive of press-clippings relating to themselves and the design work they produced. I am currently working on cataloguing these and drawing up a list of topics covered in the newspaper articles. There are several discussions around design in Ireland and how, outside of traditional textiles such as knitting and lace-making, it had been almost non-existent. 

On several occasions there are reports of the Chairman, W.H. Walsh, emphasising the importance of an art & design education (and the lack of it available in Irish schools). I particularly liked this letter he wrote to the Irish Times (published on Friday 9^th January 1970), about the quality of the exhibits in the Young Scientists Exhibition. It would be easy to dismiss his comments of “lamentable graphics, slovenly penmanship and general sloppiness” as grumpiness, but as he goes on to point out himself, a basic knowledge of design is essential to good quality products. Good design in the things and places we surround ourselves with, ones that work properly and that are beautiful, can only improve quality of life for everybody.

The Kilkenny Design Workshops Archive – Life before the Collection Management Project

The KDW archive is by far the largest and one of the most important Special Collections held by the National Irish Visual Arts Library.  From 2001, when the collection was donated to the library by the Crafts Council of Ireland, until 2008, when grant aid was sourced to develop the cataloguing project, the collection was housed in its original packing in many filing cabinets in a library store room located off campus.  The size of the collection meant that it simply could not fit into the main library space and the small number of library staff made it impossible to allocate sufficient man-hours to conducting a detailed inventory of the material.

In order to facilitate researchers interested in studying the collection, materials had to be removed from the cabinets and boxed into crates and carried from the store room to the NIVAL reading area.  As the collection was neither catalogued nor classified, it was difficult to advice researchers whether the area they were interested in was documented in our collection.  Equally, it was not always easy to guarantee that all materials relevant to the researcher’s topic could be located and retrieved.   Several notable researchers accessed the archive at this time, including Anna Moran, Joanna Quinn, and Paul Caffrey.  Indeed, when researching the exhibition catalogue Designing Ireland in 2003/04, Joanna Quinn spent several days working on her own in the off-site store room - so broad was the scope of her research and so strong was her determination to leave no stone unturned!

The KDW Collection Management Project has allowed NIVAL to appraise the archive in its entirety and to arrange and catalogue the contents to internationally recognized standards for archival description.  The project has enabled us to examine the various components of the collection, to decipher the original classification system applied to the collection by the KDW, and to identify relationships between the component parts.  As such, a once unwieldy and somewhat intimidating collection of material has become an extremely user-friendly resource – an information-rich visual chronology of the extraordinary work undertaken by both the designers and administrators of the Kilkenny Design Workshops. 

The generous supporters of the KDW Collection Management Project should be congratulated for their contribution to our ongoing effort to enhance the accessibility and research value of this remarkable collection.  The Heritage Council, the Design History Society, UK, the NCAD Seed Fund for Research and the Arts Council, our funding partner - THANK YOU!

KDW Photographic Archive - Personal Selection, Selected by Saive O'Donoghue, KDW Intern, 2010

Aran Dolls
Designed by Jenny Trigwell, c.1974
NIVAL Ref.: IE/NIVAL/KDW/TX/106
© NIVAL

One of the greatest ambitions of Kilkenny Design Workshops was to modernise Irish design. To achieve such a lofty goal in the face of a staid visual culture, the group had to simultaneously break away from established Irish design tradition, whilst still maintaining a sense of national identity or 'Irishness'. Clichéd Irish symbolism such as the shamrock, the harp, and the Celtic motif were rooted in nostalgia, the antithesis of modernism. How then, were Kilkenny Design to refer to Irishness without becoming nostalgic? One of the ways Kilkenny Design achieved this was to locate nostalgic symbolism in children's products. An example of this is the Aran Dolls, pictured, which showcase the characters of Brigid and Padraigh 'in traditional Aran dress'. The existence of such Irish caricatures is tenuous at best, but by patronising such distilled images of Ireland, Kilkenny could successfully mythologise an exaggerated (if not invented) tradition, and in doing so, profit by aligning themselves with it. The use of twee notions of the Aran man and woman in children's products served the dual purpose of naturalising Irish design nostalgia, and Kilkenny Design by association, whilst shielding its existence amongst their children's items, not their 'serious' design products.

KDW Photographic Archive - Personal Selection

Selected by Noreen McGuire, KDW Intern, 2010

Tobacco jar

Designed by Bertil Gardberg, c.1969
NIVAL Ref.: IE/NIVAL/KDW/WD/08
Copyright: NIVAL

While archiving the wood products for the KIlkenny Design Workshop NIVAL project I came across images of an afzelia tobacco jar with a Kilkenny marble lid, designed by Bertil Gardberg circa 1969 (NIVAL/KDW/WD/08). This design, like many in the KDW collection, could have been produced today, and indeed I have seen more recent interpretations of it, which are available nowadays as storage containers. What struck me in the process of archiving this material is that quite a few products were produced to serve the needs of smokers. Smoking was a less maligned activity in the 1960s and 70s than it is today, and therefore beautiful products to house your smoking paraphernalia would have been desirable. If this design were to be relaunched today it would no doubt be for the storage of more acceptable stimulants such as tea, coffee and sugar. So the KDW archive is not just a window into Irish design history, it offers a record of Irish social history made manifest in material objects.