The Yeats Sisters and Irish Design: Making, Identities and Legacies

In partnership with the Cuala Press Project at Trinity College Dublin, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Yeats Sisters Commemoration Project, this exhibition will honour and celebrate the global footprint of the Yeats sisters’ design heritage.

Elizabeth and Susan (Lily) Yeats were nationally and internationally recognised as leading figures in the Arts and Crafts movement in the early 20th century, but their contribution has perhaps been overshadowed by those of their brothers, painter Jack Yeats and WB Yeats, the poet and Nobel Laureate. The exhibition illustrates how the Cuala Industries, which the sisters founded in 1908, constructed a distinctive and sophisticated form of Irish cultural identity for national and international audiences.

This exhibition is also a collaboration with the Irish Guild of Embroiderers and will include a companion display of a series of contemporary, individual works made by the Guild’s members reflecting on, and reinterpreting, the Cuala pressmark: ‘a lone tree in an Irish landscape’, which was designed by Elizabeth Yeats for the publication of  Love’s Bitter Sweet by Robin Flower, 100 years ago this year.