Ireland's first entry to the Prague Quadrennial, the international showcase for theatre design, should launch Irish set and lighting designers onto the world stage, writes Sara Keating

A series of striking images line the temporary walls of the Pier A prefab at Dublin airport. These are photographs of Arabic women dancing and ululating in a primal tribal ritual, of men and women trapped in telephone boxes, of a young girl with a gun in her hand, eye-balling the camera quizzically. On the rush to and from the runway, scanned by the harried hurrying eye, these photographs might be social documents, anthropological records, or advertisements, but one of the most arresting photographs contains a key clue. Five painted faces, with grimaces shadowed around their smiles, are frozen between the heavy velvet drapes of a theatre's curtain: they are players on the painted Irish stage.

This week these images will line the walkway for a group of Irish theatre designers as they leave for the Prague Quadrennial (PQ07), an international showcase for all aspects of theatre design, from scenography and sound design to lights, costumes and theatre architecture. The Prague Quadrennial celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, but this, its 10th meeting, is the first time that Ireland will participate in the event. As John Comiskey, curator of Ireland's entry, admits: "It is ridiculous that up until now we haven't participated. But the theatre design community hasn't really formalised here at all. We don't even have a forum for talking to ourselves, let alone talking to other people."

Comiskey believes that Ireland's participation in PQ07 is a landmark moment both for Irish theatre designers and for Irish theatre in general, signalling a growing visual sophistication in the primarily text-based Irish theatre tradition. As Comiskey explains: "Design in Irish theatre has tended to take a back seat; it has always been more about writing and performance.

"Those elements have dominated so much that the other arts involved in the creation of theatre simply weren't visible; in terms of people's perceptions of what makes a work of theatre, they were neglected. PQ presents the art form of design apart from the art form of performance."

Ireland's participation in PQ07 was spearheaded by a voluntary board established in 2003, which included prolific members of Ireland's arts and academic community, such as Dr Cathy Leeney of UCD's Drama Studies Centre, National College of Art and Design's (NCAD) director Colm O'Briain, Phelim Donlon, a former film, drama and opera officer at the Arts Council, and theatre director Lynne Parker. With project-management assistance from the Irish Theatre Institute, and funding from, among others, Culture Ireland, the Arts Council, and the Dublin Airport Authority, Comiskey was brought on board at the start of 2006 to curate Ireland's first entry. This entry represents work from the last four years of Irish theatre design, an exhibition by theatre design students at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) and NCAD, and a small sample of recent trends in Irish theatre architecture.

Comiskey's first curatorial challenge was the sheer volume of work available for selection. "There were approximately 6,000 productions that would have been eligible but I hadn't seen all this work. I could have chosen a very single topic and explored it in great depth but I thought that our first participation should really be about introducing designers to the international community; to show that Ireland is a really active place doing good work."

While organising his final selection, Comiskey was also confronted with the difficulty of seeing the work "as a stranger would see it - impartially - because people who see this exhibition will mostly know nothing about Irish theatre. So you have to choose the work based on the evidence that has survived, and this was the biggest challenge. In some cases there were shows that were fantastic but there was only one photograph - sometimes there were no photographs at all. So I had to look at the evidence I could find and ask 'what can I interpret about the design from what I have in front of me?', ignoring what I actually knew. My [ responsibility] was to put the [ evidence] I had together - a costume, a drawing, maybe a model box - in a way that makes sense of an event that cannot be recreated."

For Alan Farquharson, whose design for Rough Magic's Improbable Frequency is featured in the PQ07 exhibition, the documentation of scenographic design is inherently problematic: "I take my own photographs, and I do keep model boxes sometimes, but they're obviously very difficult to keep, for space reasons. Another thing that happens is that they can get wrecked during the whole production process."

Costume designer Sinéad Cuthbert, whose work can be seen in six of the PQ07 entries, says that documentation is a key issue for costume designers too. Although she takes photographs and archives her sketches and research notebooks, she admits that it is "difficult to keep the costumes; they get damaged or mildewed or accidentally dumped". Cuthbert is one of a number of Irish costume designers involved in the nascent development of a costume designers' guild to tackle such issues, with the eventual aim of opening a single big costume store where costume designers can store and maintain their work in proper conditions, while functioning both as an archive and a rental facility for production companies.

Costume designer Joan O'Clery, who has four stand-alone costumes on display at PQ07, works primarily at the Abbey Theatre, and she admits that she is lucky in that her "costumes tend to go in to the store there. They are kept in their show form, so that if it looks like a production is going to travel or be revived, they are there, but the theatre owns them. As designer, though, I hold on to the designs and I keep a photographic record of the finished product." O'Clery, who is currently at the designing stage for the Abbey Theatre's forthcoming production of The Big House, will, like many of the other featured designers, travel to Prague to make sure that her work looks just right on display. "It is really interesting for me, because the four costumes of mine that will be on display will be displayed out of context" - as costumes rather than as part of a bigger production concept represented in a photograph. "The pieces are intricate and [ display] the art of costume-making itself - like the one that was made for [ the Abbey Theatre's] The Importance of Being Earnest last year, and it's all appliquéd on the side. It is a beautiful thing in itself, apart from its context in the show, and it is great to have that acknowledged."

Comiskey, meanwhile, believes that Ireland's participation in PQ07's celebration of the "essence of design itself" will be crucial to the future documentation of Irish stage design. "It is hard for people to keep that model box if they have no reason to keep it. PQ will give their documentation a purpose, a reason to keep their material."

Comiskey is also optimistic about the rising status of Irish theatre design as an art in itself: "Ireland is a place where theatre design is really happening. Writers are writing now with a greater awareness for the possibilities of what design can do for them, certain companies have [ developed] a particular aesthetic, and directors are also functioning more and more in that way, so theatre design is becoming integrated at a much earlier stage." However, Comiskey admits that, for all the striking stand-alone beauty of design images such as the ones showcased at Pier A, "you can't really say where theatre design is going without saying where theatre is going. It's a bit like writing a book about music - the essence of what it is, is not there in the exhibition, but it can inform you. And it can be an important source of inspiration."

PQ07 takes place in Prague, June 14-24