Reviewed by: Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland: Taipéis Gael, Donegal Christine Cusick Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland: Taipéis Gael, Donegal, by Meghan Nuttall Sayres; photographs by Laurence Boland, tapestries by Taipéis Gael, pp. 198. Cork: Cork University Press, 2006. Distributed by Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, PA. $39.95. Meghan Nuttall Sayres’s Weaving Tapestry in Rural Ireland charts the evolution of one community’s endeavor to honor and to sustain the traditions of Glencolmcille, County Donegal. Through an ethnographic mapping of the individual lives and histories that contribute to the foundation and sustenance of the weavers’ cooperative Taipéis Gael, Sayres engages in a project of both storytelling and listening; she never allows her own voice and perspective to silence the tale. Her text provides a vehicle for the story of this project, while communicating her knowledge of its details and wisdom in interpreting their meaning. Taipéis Gael (Gaelic Tapestries) was founded in 1993 by Monica de Bath, a native of County Laois who moved to the Donegal Gaeltacht as a young girl and whose travels and work in the community arts programs of Zimbabwe inspired her to begin a similar cooperative in Glencolmcille. Throughout, Sayres demonstrates that even the germination of the Taipéis Gael was a communal endeavor, [End Page 153] one nurtured by conversations with community members about the need to preserve the “indigenous skills of natural dyeing, spinning and weaving from ending up in the grave,” and most especially the gifts of an elderly man named Jimmy Carr. Sayres captures the collaborative attributes of this cooperative through intimate cross-generational conversations, always situating the present of tapestry against the past of tweed weaving that made it possible. In conversation, each weaver’s response builds on another’s, a communal experience that, from the content of the interview, seems to mirror their creative processes in creating the tapestries. Sayres stays mindful of such reflexive processes throughout the book. An impulse toward preservation compels many of the voices in these essays, and through both content and form, Sayres enacts how a collaborative artistic weaving community taps into the layers of culture and nature that need preservation. Glencolmcille has long been fractured by emigration. Sayres captures the villagers’ desire to create a home that invites those who want to stay and live in their native village to do so. There is a practical value to an artistic community that not only provides economic viability to a struggling community, but also fosters an appreciation for the work of its ancestors. On more than one occasion, the mentors and weavers comment that they used to view the weaving tradition as a sort of “slave labour”; now, because of Taipéis Gael, they are beginning to see it for the opportunity to express the artistic talent that it really is. The cooperative also preserves a way of existing with the land, purposefully and attentively using its resources, relearning its ecological fragility and tenacity by putting foot into field for both inspiration and product. Sayres thoughtfully traces tapestry to its sources on the land itself—with the attunement that only a weaver and sheep keeper can possess—and she honors each stage of the process as one that relies on local knowledge and practice. Framing a genealogy of sheep breeds and a natural history of dyes with stories of caring for these animals and of extracting hue from plant, these accounts remind us that such crafts are lived ways of dwelling in place. The process of weaving is mirrored by the book’s own shifting in and out of multiple genres. The astute photography of Laurence Boland is an active voice in this book, as are the color images of tapestries created by Taipéis Gael. The book is itself a collective effort; Sayres’s intuitive assemblage of word and image allow the art and the images of people and place to have voice in their story. The biographical sketches of the weavers, for example, are complemented by images of their tapestries, allowing their work to claim a voice. In the same way, Boland’s photographic mapping of the land, people, and work of this place captures moments of...