Category: Juvenilia

I won a bike for this, which I still have, second-placed nationally when I was 17. I was awarded my prize by the presenters of Jo Maxi at a ceremony in Dublin. I travelled up on the bus with my family. This poster was still on a door in the Louth Hospital in recent years. I am still a passionate anti-smoker.

This is a blast from the past. Whilst I was in NCAD I was selected to design the 1997 Marsh’s Library annual exhibition poster. A limited edition were printed in the print workshop, then stamped with the Marsh’s Library stamp. The theme that year was literature related to women.

This is my copy of ‘Emer’s Ghost,’ presented to me in Shelagh School in 1985, as a prize for designing a bookmark during Louth Libraries’ Book Week. Catherine Sefton is the pseudonym of Martin Waddell, from Newcastle. Co. Down, so I felt some local interest.

This was the first prize that I won outside school, so it convinced me that one day I could become a great artist! Prior to this, my only award was a box of chocolates for a painting of Zacchaeus up a tree, when I was seven in England. To my chagrin I found that I was expected to share these with the whole class!

The book was quite scary, me being ten, but I was intrigued to see the heroine was on first name terms with her local RUC officer, something I did not feel would happen in my neighbouring South Armagh.

My winning bookmark was in the shape of an elongated, opened out book, with the slogan ‘Just one little look, will make you read this whole book.’ I see from the frontispiece that I only came second! But I was very chuffed.

This is me receiving the Jimmy Smyth Perpetual Trophy for my Inter-Certificate Art Results. I was in the Louis, and this award was for the highest grade in Art in the Dundalk area. I was disappointed to give the trophy back after a year! But I was chuffed to win.

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.