Navan jewellery designer's London win a major boost

Navan jewellery designer Muireann Walsh has won a prestigious award at New Designers in London, the UK's most important graduate exhibition. She won the New Designers One Year On Award for her project, the Tara Brooch Collection. Muireann's specialist craft area explores the medium of anodized aluminium. She is persistently experimenting in order to further the effects of her surface texture and colour luminosity. Muireann exploits the use of colour and pattern in her work, its achievement and its ability to provoke reaction from onlookers. The Tara Brooch is one of Ireland's most iconic artifacts, and since its discovery in in 1850, it has been the subject of many reproductions in the Irish jewellery trade. "The Tara Brooch, for me, represents Ireland's romantic association with our historical culture," Muireann said. "The motifs found on such items in the National Museum provide the visual packaging to the Irish tourist experience, and so I feel that these motifs have become irrelevant and overused, its special meaning has been lost on the modern Irish public, and is now only relevant within a sea of over produced 'Celtic' symbolisms. She said she has reinvented the reproduction of this iconic Irish symbol by drawing on her inspirations from current trends of colour and pattern, and visual trends she is attracted to, which include graphic design, street art, Memphis design, Japanese culture and animation. Her award is a £500 cash prize and first year's membership to Design-Nation, the selected design resource founded by Peta Levi, MBE and one year's membership to The Design Trust.