Manning had been instrumental in the formation of the Irish Film Society in Dublin which helped to promote cinema in Ireland as an intellectual pastime (Anon., 1930). Film historians and authors Denis Condon, Kevin Rockett, Ruth Barton, John Hill and Luke Gibbons have written extensively on filmmaking in Ireland but none of their texts detail the work of pioneering Irish women. For instance, under-researched playwright, painter and co-founder of the Irish Film Society, Mary Manning (1905-1999), features very sparsely in Irish film documentation. Despite holding subordinate status to men in Irish society, women did, in fact, play significant roles in the early development of animation practice in Ireland. The enactment of the Irish Constitution was directly responsible for the removal of important female advocates from their creative roles when it was favored that working outside of the home was a male venture. Ironically, the conservative political developments in Ireland coincided with the global developments of the moving image. Abstraction did not assimilate with the print media in the 1920s and 1930s and it may be that other practices, including animation, were overlooked in a similar way in Ireland. Leading proponents include Irish modernist Mainie Jellett, who pioneered the technique of academic Cubism but whose work remained largely ignored until 1992.

In her book Modern Art in Ireland, Dorothy Walker (1997) says that Irish Modernism worked at a tangent to international movements. Irish Modernist arts practice occurred as a reaction to the wider European movement. Irish female artists were victims of a critical occlusion in comparison to their male counterparts. Irish women artists have only in recent years been included in the long list of Irish modernist painters while male artists have always sat at the top of archival catalogs. Twentieth century when animation was flourishing globally both as an industry This has led to aД¬onsiderable amount of undocumented Irish animation history spanning the That has thus far been ignored in Irish heritage and animation scholarship. Propose that, due to IrelandвЂ™s prevailing culture of emigration, Irish ModernistДЄrtists pursued animation as an extension of their artistic practice, a fact Yet, the experimental animations that were created have not been archived. Irish artists moved in these same circles. As discussed in much critical literature of the latter half of the century (e.g., see Hopkinson, 2004 Ferriter, 2004 Corcoran, 2013), the Constitution was mired in patriarchal and religious sanctimony In Europe and North America, animation practices and techniques by painters, illustrators, and craft workers were included in Modernist movements and used by artists seeking an вЂњunending canvasвЂќ, as Mary Ellen Bute (in Anon., 1965) described. The struggle for independence from British rule and the establishment of an Irish government with its own Constitution succeeded in doing two things: it established a Constitution in which the Irish state was sovereign and it embedded discrimination against women into the socio-political fabric of the country. Irish society in the early twentieth century was a place of social and political upheaval.

The films created by Irish artists were only distributed in Ireland under strict censorship laws.

Irish artists and filmmakers traveled widely for education and exhibition of their artworks. IrelandвЂ™s geographical position is an important factor to consider when taking into account the animation practices and techniques that were developing in both North America and Europe during the early-twentieth-century.

Irish animation desk blog