Totally Dublin 1
The National Print Museum of Ireland carries the
country’s history. Printing presses fill the ground floor as documents line the walls and hang from the ceiling, etching the essential stories of Ireland into permanence. It’s impossible not to feel the weight of print’s role in communicating and preserving the past as you observe the mid-century equipment and learn about the rapid-fire digitization that made the longstanding printing field almost obsolete. The sign up the stairs to the museum’s newest exhibition only cements that conviction: “Friend, you stand on sacred ground. This is a printing office.” While downstairs is reflective of the past, the museum’s upstairs exhibition carries you into modernity. The exhibition, entitled Come Fly With Me, reflects on the role of printed graphic design and aviation advertisements in developing Irish identity, integration into the global economy, and the importance of immigration to Irish design industries. Funded by Research Ireland, facilitated by Abbey Lease, and curated by Dr. Linda King, the exhibition showcases advertisements that put visitors in the shoes of tourists from decades ago. While some are more abstract interpretations of Irish wildlife and cultural style, others are illustrative caricatures or even film footage from early aviation tourism. The designs, artistic and reliant on Irish landscapes and wildlife as well as national costumes of other countries, were the basis of King’s research. Her research process is not particularly fixed; for this exhibition, she sourced around 350 posters, divided them into categories to decipher the messaging and context for the advertisements, and analysed what the posters represented. “The most important documents were the actual posters themselves as a starting point,” she said. “But then coming out of that, I worked a lot in the National Archives, and there was lots of documentary evidence there of various departments of tourism and their relationship with tourism, the departments of industry and commerce. My research is very much interdisciplinary.” The exhibition showcases and comments on the artwork of Irish tourism adverts, as well as mementos from Irish tourism and immigration, and also pulls from historical archives and uses materials lent from the National Irish Visual Arts Library, National College of Art and Design, the National Library, the Irish Film Institute, the Museum of Dublin, and members of the public. King said that Ireland’s 800-year period of colonization hindered the development of Irish design and manufacturing industries. The contributions of immigrants, especially Dutch designers, further enriched Ireland’s creative arts as they remained with their COME FLY W The National Print Museum’s latest exhibition tells the story of Irish modernization through aviation advertising. WORDS Rosalie Johnson 46
