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Claire Curneen won the
2001 Eisteddfod's gold medal in craft and design
The 2001 Eisteddfod's Visual Arts and Crafts exhibition, containing a selection of work chosen from over 2,000 individual works submitted by over 400 artists, is rightly described by the selectors as "a strange, many-headed beast". The Chairperson of the Arts and Crafts Committee expressed a wish, and a hope, that the exhibition would be a "topic of discussion on the Eisteddfod field, nationally throughout Wales and further afield on the international level". It was certainly a hot topic on the field.

Claire Curneen's exhibit won the gold medal in craft and design and a cash award of £3,000. Claire is now Cardiff-based but originally hails from Tralee. Her entry was a series of primitive style ceramic figures worked in porcelain with thin slivers of clay and gilt. This was a work of intensity and you either hated or loved it. I started off hating it from the catalogue pictures, but after visiting the exhibition the figures started to grow on me. There was a starkness and line to them that suggested a tentative serenity and the way in which the figures were grouped gave them a powerful sense of form.