| Ann Keller's
Irish Lace meets Olive Hurley's Irish Dance Dresses Sna Si - Fairy
Threads: How handmade Irish Lace has found a new life on the feis stage. Celtic
Cafe has opened new worlds to many people across the globe, especially to those
who have the pleasure of contributing to its pages. Every assignment brings a
fresh challenge and the thrill of introduction to wonderful, talented people otherwise
beyond our reach. Before Bernadette drew me into the Cafe's realms, I would never
have imagined where her request to be a Dublin representative could possibly lead
me! The adventure that has now become a fledgling new business began when
I was asked to interview world-renowned Irish Dance teacher Olive Hurley, at the
end of 2000. Olive came to my house one evening and we shared a bottle of wine
as we talked, and as if by magic, we 'clicked' and became firm personal friends.
We had many interests in common even apart from the dance. Both of us being creative
artists who treasure tradition but also like to experiment with our art was a
vital key to our future connection - that and the fact that Olive was enthusiastic
to take up the challenge and teach me Irish dancing, which I had missed out on
in my childhood and now longed to learn. My attending her dance classes all last
winter ensured our continued contact and that certainly played an important part
in my realising a longtime 'dream'. The dream to put my Celtic design work into
Irish Dance costumes. My training is in the History of Art and the techniques
of lacemaking and the Irish whitework embroidery known as Mountmellick. I have
been a lace teacher and designer since 1985, something that began as a one-night-a-week
hobby and led to a small business. As well as teaching, both at home and at overseas
workshops, since 1990 I have been publishing books of my original lace patterns
with instructions for lacemakers who have no regular access to classes to work
from. I also market the wooden and bone lacemakers' tools by mail order, decorating
them myself with miniature painting - an old English tradition for the tools.
I have a website, www.annmargaretkeller.com
to show patterns, books and bobbins to a wider range of lacemakers. From
my Art History days in Trinity College, Dublin, I was well acquainted with the
intricacies of Irish Celtic design, the fantastic embellishments of masterpieces
such as the Book of Kells and the amazing carvings in stone from the past. I always
had a desire to see them used as sources for Irish lace design, which strangely
they had not been. Sometimes a very Irish motif such as a harp would appear in
one of the needlemade laces, but never in the lace that I specialized in, Bobbin
Lace, which is basically a method of plaiting(braiding) and twisting threads wound
on long, thin holders known as 'bobbins'. I had been drawn to that technique as
it is the oldest form of lace known in Ireland, dating back over 300 years, more
than double other, better known forms, and yet had not been taught here since
the 1920s. For years I was discouraged from taking on the challenge of Irish Celtic
design myself for Bobbin Lace on account of the mathematical demands of the interlace.
Also, the Celtic world necessitated the use of vibrant colour, and colour in lace
came across to me as rather flat and lifeless - I was very much a traditionalist
and preferred white, ecru (creamy) or black lace. Then of course our great
cultural revolution in the dance came in the mid 1990's, inspiring all who saw
it, and parallel to that from the outside world came a new era in thread production,
which brought life to the colours with glitter and sparkle fused into the fibres.
In 1996 I sat in the Point Theatre and marvelled at the set and costume design
in Michael Flatley's Lord of the Dance - so many sourceable ancient motifs incorporated
into exquisite modern designs, painted into the wonderful hangings in the Celtic
Dream sequence, lavishly embroidered and appliqued into the costumes of other
numbers. I knew as I looked at the show for the first time that there had to be
a way for the lace I designed to be created with Irish Celtic themes, and a way
for it to find a place where I always wished to see it, on the stage. Sna
Si, Fairy Threads, were still a long way away! Life was too overcrowded with other
pressing matters for me to apply the thoughts to paper and thread, until that
unique entity, the Millennium, was suddenly upon us, positively insisting that
it be marked in a special way by every artist. I determined to produce one Irish
celtic design in lace as my Millennium project, and sat down to create a fan leaf
of motifs based on our ancient legends and symbols with a little futuristic element
as well. Of course artists' creative minds don't ever stop at a single design
and soon I had a collection of fan designs which ended up being a book. Suddenly
I found that Irish Celtic Lace had been born and had taken on a life of its own.
I was asked if I would teach the 'style' of lace, and encouraged to create more
designs for other items, clothing trims, pictorial pieces, jewelry and hair ornaments,
decoration for shoes. I also found that people with no previous knowledge of lace,
or notion to make it, suddenly wished to learn, specifically to achieve Irish
Celtic pieces, so in fact this year I am offering for the first time a starter
kit specially for new lacemakers to make the Irish designs. Olive Hurley
saw my lace designs and was immediately attracted to them, perhaps because of
their combination of tradition and innovation. Early on in our friendship she
spoke of the possibility of applying the lace to a dance costume and although
both of us had insanely hectic schedules in our lives, we kept talking about it
frequently and I made up some sample sketches and then lace motifs for her. Eventually
some of the samples found their way onto a black velvet dress she was wearing
for a demonstration dance at a ball in Vienna in January 2002, and over Christmas,
just before she left on that expedition, she offered me the challenge, and chance,
of my life! She needed a new class costume for her dancers competing in the Ceili
event at the World Irish Dancing Championships in Glasgow in March 2002, and she
asked me if I could design and make her dresses featuring the Bobbin Lace. The
intricacies of lacemaking by hand being the time-consuming art they are, March
2003 would have been more realistic a time-frame to produce eight dance dresses.
Also, as the cost of the dresses was being met by fund-raising on the part of
the children and their parents the budget was extremely restricted, but this was
a unique opportunity to showcase the lace. I gathered a few top lacemakers who
I knew were interested and put the challenge to them, knowing they would be as
unable to turn it down as I was! And so began about ten weeks of frantic activity,
quite a few sleepless nights with looming deadline and usual artistic hiccups,
as gradually the dresses began to come to life. I had lacemakers in three
countries at work - beyond the shores of Ireland I had recruited an Irish lacemaker
in Portsmouth, England, and another lacemaker in New York State, USA. The quality
of the work had to be uniformly high and those involved also had to complete the
work in abnormally fast time. As we worked two 'subs' were added to the team of
eight, so the eight dresses became ten, just to add to the pressure! In the end
each dress required some seventy hours of lacemaking. The initial brief,
to create a dress in black velvet lined with white satin and with lace of white
and silver evolved as we worked. I took as our theme the most basic and ancient
root of Irish Celtic interlace, the eternal heart - a continuous line of heart
shapes interlocked, bending it to form collar and border pieces. As features I
took a Celtic birthsign, the butterfly, which I thought particulary well suited
to the fairy lightness of the young dancers for whom the dresses were designed.
These too could be designed with interlaced lines. And to give all the lace the
sparkle it needed onstage it was accented with Swarovski Austrian crystals, handsewn
onto the motifs. With these dresses was made a conscious decision to create
a simple, restrained design. They were not intended to be solo dresses, but had
to be distinctive and have stage impact despite their deceptive, uncluttered nature.
The rich contrast of colours and textures worked well and it was an incredible
thrill to watch from the theatre balcony in Glasgow as Olive's dancers performed
at the Championships! Many people commented on the dresses and they certainly
stood out among the myriad designs from around the world. The Championship organizers
graciously allowed us to demonstrate the lacemaking techniques in the trading
area on the Sunday, after the Ceili competition, and we were able to explain the
work to many interested onlookers. One great advantage of using handmade
lace in this context is that it is applied by hand to the finished garment, not
worked into the fabric like embroidery or machine applique. Therefore, the expensive
motifs can be re-used, transfered from one dress to another, and since the embellishment
is a major part of the cost of dresses, that has to be significant for the growing
young dancer. Lace motifs could also be ordered for an existing dress, also can
be combined with the glitterball and shining materials now so popular in the feis
world. I am presently working on a sample solo dress which will show the lace
created in colours and used in conjunction with the textured fabrics and appliques,
yet still drawing on the traditional Irish Celtic sources for design themes. Solo
dresses in fact are much more appealing challenges to lacemakers, who find repetition
tedious in their work. It was asking a lot of them to produce ten sets of the
one design at once, as in their eyes it is asking them to be mechanical; their
interest is much more easily maintained if the motif is to be made once and never
again. Conquering the new design is what they enjoy doing, so my intention is
to make each and every solo dress unique. My wish is to offer a selection of design
themes, with a selection of colour schemes, and each dress created will never
be repeated exactly. Obviously, the Irish themes and motifs will recur, but each
rendering will be different, so the dancer will know that no-one else will ever
have a dress like hers. The next challenge then will be to produce male costumes
that will appeal to the young men who dance, and who at the moment are rather
lost since the kilt has virtually disappeared and yet there is nothing coherent
to replace it as a style of dress. I can well see the Irish Celtic Lace finding
a place here, in richly interlaced, stirking motifs applied discreetly to collar
tips, cuffs, belt etc. of the neat shirt-and-pants outfit now becoming more prevalent.
It is our hope that dancers of both genders will be attracted to the concept
of incorporating handmade lace in their dance costumes. If they are, it is one
more way in which an ancient Irish art form will have found new life in the modern
world, thus offering a way to preserve the tradition and to help it grow for the
future. As that is what the Irish Dance world of the twenty-first century is all
about, it seems a very fitting partnership. How extraordinary too, that in a way
Celtic Cafe has been a key player in bringing it about!
Feature:
Annie of Dublin
Original
Web Design: Alexander Servas
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