From today’s Irish Times (April 8th 2011)
Back in 1922, when the Free State was established, Ireland “was bankrupt, its people psychologically scarred, romantic nationalist sentiment had been exposed as largely ideologically hollow . . . ” Sound familiar?
This description, by Linda King, is included in a new book, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992 , which describes how Irish identity emerged through, and was shaped by, design and visual culture, published by Cork University Press.
Ireland, Design and Visual Culture is an edited collection of interdisciplinary essays on the subject of design and visual culture in Ireland from 1922 to the early 1990s. The essays, written from different disciplinary and academic perspectives, explore the tensions inherent in the visualisation of the newly emergent State from the 1920s. The book explores the shaping of Irish modernity within such visual discourses as architecture, advertising, currency, illustration, industrial design, print ephemera, public spectacle and theatre design, within an international context and suggests that Irish society was more open to European and American visual and cultural influence than has previously been considered.
Linda King is a lecturer in Design History and Theory, and Visual Communication Design at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire (IADT). Elaine Sisson is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire (IADT) and is the author of Pearse's Patriots: St Enda's and the Cult of Boyhood (Cork University Press, 2004).
This highly illustrated book in colour is available in bookshops now.
April 2011, ISBN 978-185918-472-1, €39.00, £35 , hardback
170 x 240mm, 312 pages
Further details
http://tiny.cc/uxajo
Exploring these ideas in the Irish context, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture is far more fascinating to the interested lay reader than its rather academic title and various chapter headings might suggest-Irish Times
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