HISTORY
Lillias Mitchell
Lillias Mitchell founded the Irish Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers in 1975. Many years before that, in 1951, she founded the Weaving Department in Ireland's National College of Art and Design.
Lillias was born in Dublin in 1915. Her artistic talents were recognised at an early age and in her teen age years she studied painting and sculpture. In 1943 she was invited to North Wales to teach clay modelling which she did most successfully. She was also required to teach weaving under the direction of the famous weaver and teacher Ella McLeod. And it was then that her great love of weaving spinning and dyeing was born. Three years later in 1946 she returned to Dublin and set up a school of weaving called the Golden Fleece with a friend Morfudd Roberts. In 1949 Morfudd Roberts left Ireland to take up a teaching post in England, and Lillias, realising that she could not manage the school on her own, was encouraged to approach the Department of Education. There in 1950 she met the then Minister of Education who invited her to set up a weaving department in the National College of Art. Lillias then went to Sweden to extend her weaving knowledge by attending a summer school and to purchase looms. In 1951 she returned with the looms to set up the Weaving Department in two rooms in the National College of Art. As the Weaving Department expanded it was moved into two prefabricated huts in the garden of Dail Eirann and there Lillias taught weaving spinning and dyeing until she retired in 1979. Then the Weaving Department moved again with the College to its present location in Thomas Street.
In 1975 Lillias Mitchell founded the Irish Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers and took a great interest in its development. Lillias kept in constant touch with the Weaving Department at the National College of Art and Design over the years and for many years we had the Jesse Mitchell Tea Party in weaving and she presented book prizes to winning students. When the Jesse Mitchell Trust closed in 1994, Lillias sponsored the Lillias Mitchell Prize in the Royal Dublin Society's National Craft Competition.
After her retirement Lillias did a lot more painting. In 1979 she was elected to membership of the Royal Hibernian Academy and exhibited many times with them during the 1980s and 90s. She was very pleased to be made an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1995. She had been painting all of her adult life and was an exhibiting member of the Watercolour Society since 1940. On account of her distinguished artistic career, she was made an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Dublin Society in 1993.
It is difficult to do justice to all of her diverse talents and achievements. Lillias was proud of the weaving tradition in her family and she loved researching traditional Irish spinning dyeing and weaving. Three of her books have been published: The Craft of Handspinning Dyeing and Weaving in Ireland in 1970, The Wonderful Work of the Weaver in 1972, and Irish Spinning Dyeing and Weaving in 1978.
The Golden Fleece Award is an artistic fund established as a charitable bequest by the late Lillias Mitchell, who died in January 2000. She left this fund in place as part of her legacy to establish an annual award of approximately €20,000 overall.
The Golden Fleece Award aims to support and promote a wide range of artistic creativity, recognising excellence in painting, textiles and sculpture, glasswork, and all the traditional crafts. The Award was launched in 2001 and is now widely recognised as a distinctive stamp of creative support in the realm of Irish art.