Art and design and everything blog
This is a winning poster in the 1992 Slógadh in Dundalk. I was in the Louis at the time. It was made into a shop sign (ar oscailt means open). Years later a neighbour told me he got a kick out of seeing an English girl winning an Irish language competition. I was chuffed that he remembered it. For more information about Slógadh, visit: https://www.gael-linn.ie/en/about-us/history
This was the winning design in a 1996 competition to design a new Bank of Ireland MasterCard to replace Access. It made it into a quarter of a million wallets.
Rationale:
Archery – the stuff of legend – from William Tell to Robin Hood – timeless and ancient art – found wherever there are communities of people, necessary for their survival. An archer stands on the world, his/her domain, just as it is with MasterCard. Master marksman/woman connotation. The bow forms the clock above the earth, crossing international time zones-up to the minute, convenient, twenty-four hours a day. The arrows shoot into space – there is the suggestion of the moon in the curve of the bow – limitless, universal, day or night. Straight to the mark, straight forward, no messing, as an arrow.
A recent visit to the Titanic Experience in Belfast offered food for thought. My grandparents Anne and Johnny moved from Liverpool to Belfast during the Second World War to escape the bombs! The move was prompted because, on their way to the air-raid shelter, my toddler Aunt Mary was blown out of my grandfather’s arms.
Johnny got a job in Harland and Wolff. He must have made a convincing Protestant, because he worked there for five years. One day his friend spotted that he had a white cross, drawn in chalk, on the back of his coat. So the family relocated again, to County Louth, and his homeplace between Hackballscross and Inniskeen.
The Titanic showed that during the 1940s H & W specialised in building warships. We do not actually know what job Johnny had there.
My father was born in Belfast. At one point my grandmother was making two trips a day on the train to Éire, with tea secreted about the person of her infant child. Rationing was in place. This was just the start of his smuggling career. As a child he graduated to bringing across butter from South Armagh on a bicycle. But that is for another story.
Harland & Wolff 1861 – 2019
This is a series of paintings by my grandmother, Alice Foulger, in the Birmingham and Worcester areas in 1956. My mother Lorna is shown in a blue dress in some of them.
