RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary

The Branchardardière Fund was set up in 1890 with the bequest from Mademoiselle Eleanor Riego De La Branchardière. The RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary current purpose is to provide funds to support contemporary Irish lace makers.

Fiona Harrington, Fragile Economies, 2020.

The Branchardière Fund was set up in 1890 with a bequest from Eleonore Riego De La Branchardière (her mother was Irish and her father was French), whose 72 books on needlework revolutionised the world of lace and had a major influence on fashion in the Victorian era. In subsequent years the fund was administered by several different organisations and financed a range of projects that helped workers in the Irish Lace industry. From 2001 to 2017 the RDS distributed the proceeds of the fund via a lace prize at its annual RDS Crafts Competition/Awards. 

In 2021 the inaugural RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary was awarded. Valued at €8,000 in its first year, it is worth €2,000 annually. 

2024 RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary Winner - Olwen Bourke

Olwen says that she is "continuously inspired by flowers and leaves, and the coastal Irish landscape where I grew up. All of my collections are made from earth friendly, biodegradable fabrics, including handmade lace, upcycled fabrics, Irish linen and ecovero viscose".

Judges for 2024's awards included Camilla Hanney, ceramist and joint winner of RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary in 2022; Dr. Isha Tyagi, Head of Craft & Education at DCCI, and Katharine Maurer, a member of the RDS Arts Committee. 

Camilla Hanney, former winner and judge said: “Olwen has found a sustainable way to create beautifully delicate, timeless garments by repurposing Irish lace. She has successfully found a way to celebrate the beauty and history of Irish lace in a contemporary format. Her proposal actively promotes and sheds light on the toil of Irish lacemakers. Olwen’s work demonstrates her dedication to the craft of Irish lace. I am very excited to see what her future career holds.”

Olwen’s work takes inspiration from Irish fashion designers including Sybil Connolly and how she transformed traditional Irish lace into high fashion. The aim of Olwen’s work is to highlight the beauty of Irish lace, to push the boundaries of lace techniques in fresh and exciting ways, to create a demand, a revival and employment for lace making, and to show its huge relevance for today's fashion market. Olwen is currently working on a new collection of bridal and eveningwear to show how Irish lace can be used in modern and relevant ways for the 21st century by combining antique Irish lace with new Irish lace embellishments. She is also working on a new collection of shirts, made from both Irish linen and Irish lace.

2023 RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary Winner

Jack O’Meara intends to use his bursary to create a series of ceramic vessels that draw on Irish traditional lace and relevant techniques for visual information. His aim is to experiment with soft and hard materials, combining lace stitches and buttonhole stitch variations with hand built clay panels, in order to create uniquely constructed vessels. The vessels will not just contain areas of stitching, rather, they will rely on interlaced stitching and the forces of gravity to keep them structurally sound. The materiality of both textiles and clay are vast, and Jack wants to compare and contrast the processes of lacemaking and embroidery with ceramics and clay. As well as lacemaking, Jack has a keen interest in Raku, since taking pottery classes as a child. Jack hopes to experiment with attempting to capture Irish lace motifs on raku clay bodies using a process similar to horsehair raku.

Jack O’Meara said: “My interest in lace has only recently developed out of my obsession with embroidery. As embroidery is a core tenet of my practice, it seemed only natural to progress to using needlepoint lace as my work became smaller and more intricate. My practice is inspired by Irishness, our rich material culture and society, and my own textile heritage. I am delighted to receive this award as a recent graduate, to be given the opportunity to celebrate and reimagine the historical materiality of Ireland is a privilege.”

2022 RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary Winners

The joint winners of the 2022 RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary were Camilla Hanney and Róisín de Buitléar. Passionate about Ireland’s culture and traditions, Róisín de Buitléar plans to use the bursary to support a period of research leading to the creation of a large-scale artwork for construction and installation at the National Museum of Country Life in Mayo. The artwork is intended to be made onsite in an exploration of craft techniques that include the wider community, which encourages the contribution of skills and knowledge sharing. Camilla Hanney will use the bursary to develop a new series of work comprising of a combination of hand built ceramic wall works, draped, folded, and imprinted with traditional Irish lace patterns, alongside physical swatches, doilies, and handkerchiefs of fabric dipped in porcelain slip and fired to create delicate, white ceramic fragments. 

Speaking about the bursary, recipient Roisin De Builtear said, “Lace is an international language of craft, a line of history shared by people throughout the world. I aim to study lace history and practice in private and museum collections. I wish to research the configuration of lace themes in contemporary practice to examine the use, production, and placement of lace fabric in a historical and contemporary context.”

Camilla Hanney said, “Lace often enters my work as a central motif within the physical work I make, while also quietly informing a lot of the research behind my practice. I am interested in the conflicting properties between a material that is so often associated with innocence and virtue but was originally created by women of the Magdalene laundries who were considered by the Catholic church as ‘immoral’ or ‘impure'".

2021 RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary Winner 

Fiona Harrington was the inaugural winner of the RDS Branchardière Lace Bursary. An Irish visual artist who works with handmade lace, Fiona is also a curator and a researcher and recipient of numerous international awards including the Thomas Damann Bursary and the RDS Graduate Prize, National Craft Award. Her work has been exhibited widely and she has travelled extensively giving talks and demonstrations on Irish lace. These include the Textile Arts Centre, New York, 2018 and Straight Out of Ireland exhibition, Philadelphia, 2019.

Winning the bursary allowed Fiona to develop her ideas and create a new collection of handmade lace artwork through which she aimed to “strengthen the profile of Irish lace worldwide and reconnect with Ireland’s history of being a world class producer of handmade lace.” Fiona has built up a significant public profile in the world of lace and will bring the craft to international attention through her work. She was recently selected as a representative of excellence in craftsmanship on the Michelangelo Foundation’s, Homo Faber Guide - a unique digital platform that features the best in crafts mastery across Europe.

Fiona began her training in lacemaking as an intern in Kenmare Lace and Design Centre in 2012 and has since developed and applied her craft to contemporary art and social commentary. Her studio project for her MA in Art and Research Collaboration was titled Irish Lace: Contradiction, Complexity and Commodity. It explored the relationship between domestic activity and female labour and examined how lace was often used to both control and liberate women. Fiona’s work is innovating the medium and bringing it to new audiences. In her piece Fragile Economies, she interspliced wire with thread, enabling her to create three-dimensional sculptural lace forms that she applied to eggshells. She was invited to participate in Lace Paint Hair, a 3-person exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2020. In June 2021 she will represent Ireland at Doily Free Zone - an international lace symposium.