Concerned that Irish craft is being lost amid a raft of cheap imports, the Crafts Council is championing Irish artisans with a series of public demonstrations, writes Gemma Tipton
A piece of grey rock has been glued on to a painted green background above the legend Genuine Blarney Stone. Made in Japan, says the sticker on the back. Hand-thrown mugs from the west of Ireland are just different enough to show they are not mass-produced; the price reflects this, too. A supermarket goes upmarket with an elegant vase, conceived by a famous Irish designer. It is one of thousands, and has been made somewhere that definitely isn't Ireland. Then there is the one-off creation. It is far more expensive than the other things in the shop, and it has been made, perhaps, to be looked at more than it has been made to be used.
You can find all of these examples on our high streets, but which most accurately describes the state of craft in Ireland? What is the role for Irish crafts? Are they souvenirs for the tourists who pull up in their coaches on Nassau Street in Dublin, or who flock to the gift shops around Blarney, Killarney, Clifden and Cahirciveen? Or is "hand-made in Ireland" still not only a mark of quality in design and making but also an emotional thing, a connection with the land on which we live?
Craft in Action, which begins this month at the Kilkenny shop in Dublin, aims to bring a sense of the latter to our idea of Irish craft. Craft in Action has selected Irish craftspeople to create work in the Nassau Street store, to show the processes involved in making this mug, that piece of jewellery, that bog-oak sculpture. It will also challenge some of our perceptions and misconceptions of contemporary craft.
There is also the emerging difference between Irish-designed and Irish-made, and in order to compete with the levels of quality of mass-produced designer goods, and their increasingly low prices, this is a route that many large companies have had to take. So where does this leave individual craftspeople?
Portfolio, a scheme that encourages the creation of one-off pieces aimed at the very top end of the market - craft as art, so to speak - is one solution proposed by the Crafts Council.
Another is the Craft in Action initiative, also supported by the Crafts Council, which aims to reconnect people with the uniqueness of something hand-made and so remind us why it may be worth paying more for a hand-crafted plate or mug. As the illustrator Anna Nielsen describes it, Craft in Action is a chance to "showcase our specific passion - because to survive in today's world of commerce we have to be passionate about what we do".
Her fellow exhibitor Helen Connelly, of Celtic Roots, makes one-off pieces from bog oak; she will be demonstrating how they prepare, carve and finish their sculptures, as well as showing images of the bogs from which the ancient wood has come. "We're not really in the tourist market," she says. "We're working where people appreciate the quality and the essence of the place and the person making it; where people realise there's more to objects than just consumption."
Stephen Pearce, one of Ireland's most successful ceramicists, agrees with this idea of what it means to make genuine craft and why that matters. "I'm deeply rooted in tradition, and I feel strongly about things having a relation to, and a connection to, people," he says. "In your life you get the things you like in leather, wood, wool, cotton, silk, diamond, clay. You have a relation to the materials." This relationship influences his designs - clay, for example, "is a clumsy material, so I don't try to refine it too much".
The whole market for the stuff people buy in their lives has changed, he says. "Some people are going with brands, some against. We're following the US a little, in that people are now choosing to buy by brand. In the past you would go into a shop and pick up a thing and the question would be: Do I like that? Now we're letting the brand, the name, do that for us, and that means some of the dialogue vanishes."
Another thing that has changed is our acceptance of the role of fashion in home design. If purple, animal-print, gold or green are "in" this season, then so much the better for the stores that can sell vast quantities of furniture and objects to people who will need to fling them all out again in a year and start over with chrome, silver, smoked glass or whatever else may be on the designer list for 2008.
There is more profit to be made in short-term sales than there is in the more expensive table that you will pass to your children - and that they will one day sit at with their grandchildren. Heirlooms don't make money for anyone but antique dealers, although perhaps, in these days of limited environmental resources and a growing acknowledgment of the high cost of waste, we would do well to return to a culture of valuing objects for their longevity rather than for their fleeting fashionability.
The value of understanding Irish craft, and of supporting it, also lies in the idea of craftspeople as carriers of history and tradition. Even if their designs are contemporary, even if their methods marry the traditional with the technological (which many increasingly do), making things by hand preserves a way of life that has continued over thousands of years, and not just in Ireland.
Stephen Pearce tells the story of going to Japan as a 22-year-old. "I thought I knew everything," he says. And then, at an exhibition of ceramics from 3000 BC, he saw what looked like his own ideas for designs, reminding him of the idea of continuity, and that there is essentially nothing new.
Pearce also feels strongly that craft is all about communication, and this is one of the keys to Craft in Action: the scope for a genuine communication between maker and user. "You could be cynical and say it's just another way of making money, but craft is all about communication, and that's what we can do here in Ireland that a factory in China can't." u
• Each exhibitor will be in the Kilkenny store on Nassau Street, Dublin 2, for three consecutive days (Thursday and Friday from 11am to 8pm; Saturday from 10am to 6pm) from next week until July 28th. The participants are Simply Slate, from next Thursday; Wild Goose Studio, from June 21st; Anna Nielsen, from June 28th; Celtic Roots, from July 2nd; Nicholas Mosse, from July 5th; Ceramic Forms, from July 19th; and Stephen Pearce, from July 26th.