Fiona Mulholland: Grenade Heeled Shoes, 1998, aluminium and leather, size 6 shoes; courtesy the artist Fiona Mulholland: Ring Cuffs, 1995, silver and 18ct gold, 20 x 120 mm; courtesy the artist	Erika Marks: Archaic Gold Collection, 1999, brooch and pendant, silver and 24ct gold, 50 x 50 mm, and 70 x 35 mm; courtesy the artist.

Contemporary Irish Jewellery

Irish and Irish-based jewellers combine the influences of contemporary American and European traditions in their work in imaginative and varied ways, as can be seen in the work of Alan Ardiff, Erika Marks, Brigitte Turba, and Fiona Mulholland.

Reviews of Irish jewellers and their works usually focus on how the designers relate to the four thousand year old tradition of jewellery making on this island. This heritage is undoubtedly both hugely inspiring and immensely daunting, and no Irish jeweller can ignore its presence. But Bronze Age and early Christian jewellery are no longer the only kinds being exhibited. The Crafts Council exhibition space and Designyard in Dublin, and other quality craft jewellery outlets around the country, have introduced Irish jewellers to each other's work, and also to contemporary jewellery from Europe and North America. Unlike the displays of Irish historical jewellery in the National Museum, the works in these retail outlets change regularly, and the objects can be removed from their cases, handled, and placed on the body. This kind of physical access to a variety of work is particularly important to jewellers.

At the geographical crossroads between North America and Europe, Irish jewellers seem to straddle the very different jewellery trends on the two continents. Jewellery critics tend to agree about the nature of this difference. In Europe, Modernism and abstraction prevail, along with conceptual jewellery, which emphasises ideas over materials or skills. Theory and design are all-important, along with a problem solving approach, where the jeweller works within self-imposed restrictions, such as making wearability the focus of the piece. In America, on the contrary, there is an emphasis on narrative and figurative work, and on subject matter derived from contemporary culture. Designers use jewellery as a vehicle for personal emotional expression, to communicate feelings such as humour, anger, and fear. The process of making is as important, or more important, than the initial design process, and the sensual delight of American jewellers in a wider range of materials is evident. Change is more rapid than in Europe, where the response to new ideas is more cautious. While there are individual practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic who do not conform to these trends, these are the broad continental differences.

Jewellers in Ireland have tapped into both of these traditions, often combining ideas from America and Europe in the same piece. The work of the four designer-makers considered here is representative of the dynamic influence of both continents on jewellery produced in Ireland.

Possibly the best known Irish jeweller is Alan Ardiff. His style is unmistakable, and his quirky figurative objects have a wide appeal. Not only do his pieces have a narrative, but they often provide humorous social comment. In 1991 he generated some controversy with his silver and gold condom case, entitled Box of Optimisms, made at the time of the legal disputes about where condoms could be sold. His Mobileman brooch of 1993 captured the growing use of mobile phones, and A Streetcar named Divine (1997), also a brooch, featured a car, a prostitute, and a figure representing a well known young English actor. His most recent topical piece is a Millennium bug brooch (1999). Ardiff's work, however, relates to American trends in more than just its figurative subject matter. He mixes gold with silver, copper, and other metals, with an eclecticism characteristic of jewellers on the other side of the Atlantic. This combination of metals put him into direct conflict with the Irish Assay Office in 1993. His mixing of gold with inferior metals meant that it could not be hallmarked, and he was warned by the Assay Office that it was illegal to sell gold without a hallmark in Ireland. After considerable publicity the Office decided to drop the matter. In America it is not compulsory to hallmark gold, which gives makers greater freedom to mix their materials.

Ardiff has criticised much European design as "too clinical, angular and impersonal."¹ While he does reject abstraction, he nevertheless incorporates other aspects of European jewellery making into his work--emphasising the finished design of the piece before it is made, and minimising the marks left on the metal from his fabrication techniques. Looking at his works one gets the sense that their maker is a storyteller and an engineer first, and a metalsmith second, as it is the wit and the moving parts of his pieces rather than the qualities of the metal which attract the eye.

Another jeweller who combines American and European trends in her work, but in a different way, is Erika Marks. Her pieces are abstract, but hint at meaning. She uses gold and silver to make jewellery in combinations of basic geometric shapes, softened with organic colouring and traces of the process of their making. Marks also makes marks on the metal in a combination of lines and dots reminiscent of Ogham script. The 'script' which she uses, unlike Ogham, is not a recognised alphabet, which means that it offers the possibility of many meanings rather than one. "I want it to look mysterious--it means whatever you want it to mean," she says.² This ambiguity is characteristic of European jewellery, where meaning is open-ended rather than fixed. The wearer can express their interpretation of Marks' jewellery by wearing it with different clothes or in different social situations. In this way they complete the meaning of the piece. This is unlike the meanings of Ardiff's works, which are fixed by their titles and do not vary according to context. The wearer does not interpret them but exhibits them.

However, the emphasis which Marks places on process in her work is less European than American, as is the reference to a collective history in her script-like markings. These symbols do not originate in one particular civilisation, but could have belonged to any of our pasts. The universality of the urge to communicate and our common history are thus suggested in Marks' jewellery. In this she rejects the ahistoricism of European Modernism.

Non-Irish jewellers have made quite an impact on Irish jewellery design. The process of 'importing' craftspeople from abroad goes back hundreds of years in Irish craft. It was revived in the 1960s with the establishment of the Kilkenny Design workshops, when European jewellers were invited to Kilkenny to teach their crafts to Irish students. In recent times the process has evolved more organically, as foreign craftspeople have been attracted by the growing Irish awareness of, and interest in, craft jewellery. This influx of jewellers from abroad has been a significant factor in the move towards the use of non-traditional materials in jewellery. This area has been slow to take off, perhaps hampered by public awareness of Ireland's long history of jewellery-making in precious metals. It has also been affected by the recession in the late 1970s and 80s. Paradoxically, non-precious jewellery is more likely to be worn in a time of prosperity, when it becomes a matter of choice, than during a recession, when it might be seen as evidence of the wearer's financial difficulties. A final factor in the growth of this area is increasing public awareness of design. With precious metals, much of the value of a piece is inherent in the metal, whereas with everyday materials, almost all the value lies in the design and making of a piece. "The appreciation of the non-material wealth of jewellery, its concept and design quality stems from a more design-literate audience."³

Brigitte Turba, who has spent most of the 1990s here, was one of the first jewellers in Ireland to use primarily non-precious materials, and her imaginative use of recycled plastic from mineral water bottles or toothbrushes caught the attention of many. She uses this material not for its financial value, but for its ecological--even moral--worth. Her work is predominantly abstract, and its visual interest lies in the textures, colours and shapes of the plastic materials which she uses, combined on occasion with silver wires and clasps. The light, tickly texture of the material also has a strong tactile appeal. The abstraction of her work makes it very European, but the freedom with which Turba chooses her materials, and the social awareness inherent in her use of recycled plastics, represent more of an American style.

A final dimension in jewellery design is the conceptual--jewellery as performance. This is the least explored area in contemporary Irish jewellery. Fiona Mulholland is pushing at the boundaries of Irish jewellery in this direction. Her work is meticulously crafted, and often rigidly geometric, very much in line with European formalism. But in many of her pieces she has minimised wearability in order to challenge our ideas about jewellery and the social rituals of which it is a part. The symbolic exchange of rings in marriage, for example, which adds so much significance to traditional plain gold bands, is one of the customs which she questions. Ring Weight (1995) is a chunky wedding ring in silver and gold, attached by a silver chain to a small but hefty concrete hemisphere--a finely crafted ball and chain. Another piece from the same collection, Ring Cuffs, joins his-and-hers wedding rings with a chain, emphasising the ban on divorce in Ireland at the time. As far as Mulholland is concerned, these pieces are wearable--it's just a matter of having the courage to wear them. The point of jewellery like this, however, is not so much its wearability but its challenge to the conventions of body ornament, its rituals and its meanings.

Mulholland's work from the late 1990s departs from the stark geometry of these pieces, incorporating found objects into her repertoire. She has produced a series of pieces based on the difficulties of surviving urban life, combining American-style social comment and freedom of materials with European conceptualism. Grenade-heeled shoes can be worn for self-defense; GhettA Space, a tape measure in a quiver, allows the wearer to mark out their personal space; and Reel for an Urban Labyrinth leaves a trail of thread behind the wearer as they walk through the city, to ensure that they can find their way home. These strategies for survival she sees as indispensable for life in the new millennium.

Contemporary jewellers in Ireland stand between two continents and two traditions, combining elements of each in different ways. The English word 'jewellery' has only one root--it comes from 'jeweller', an artist who works with precious stones.⁴ The Irish word 'seodra' comes from 'seoid' or 'séad', however, which has two meanings. The first is a treasure, valuable possession, or jewel; the other is a path, way, course, or journey.⁵ This path or journey between the two rich traditions of Europe and America is what defines contemporary Irish jewellery.

¹Deirdre McQuillan, Going for Gold...and Silver, Sunday Tribune, June 6, 1991.
²Deirdre McQuillan, On Her Marks, Sunday Tribune, January 18, 1998.
³Janice West, Made to Wear--Creativity in Contemporary Jewellery, London: Lund Humphries, 1998, p. 24.
⁴Sabina Strobel, A Chair is a Table, in Contemporary Jewelry from the Federal Republic of Germany, Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 18.
⁵Gearrfhoclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, Baile Átha Cliath: Richview Browne & Nolan, 1981, p. 651.

Catherine Bates has taught at the National College of Art and Design since 1996, and is now lecturer in Design History at the Limerick School of Art and Design.

Article reproduced from From the Edge: Art and Design in C20th Ireland, a special accompanying CIRCA 92, Summer 2000, produced in collaboration with the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.