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.