This project has come at a point when my practice has undergone a critical change; a move away from the city to the rural, from Dublin to Oileán Chléire. I left my practice behind in my studio in Dublin, it was reimagined on the island; reimagined in another way of being, the land and the sea becoming entangled in both my life and my practice. Live casting silicone on the land and press moulding clay with fistfulls of gravel from the beach. Everything is outdoors, my mongrel hybrid kiln built under the blazing summer sun, my tables in a constant state of rotting and drying as the sea air eats through my gas burners. Working with the weather - things weighted down for the winds from the Atlantic and plastic held tight in place over any greenware.

The Clay Festival at the National Sculpture Factory then came around - an opportunity to temporarily transform my practice - to take a practice focused so purely on working in the outdoors, directly with nature, back into a building so rooted in the industrial. To go from live casting rockfaces weathered by the ocean to live casting Victorian bricks and crane mechanisms.

The work I’ve been making on Oileán Chléire are artefacts of place - they are artworks that are archiving details and materials of the island. Through these details I am capturing a feeling, an essence, of the island. This is what I wanted to bring to the NSF, a process of archiving and creating artefacts of a building and its details, trying to capture the feeling the place evokes through making works in collaboration with the building itself.

The pieces that have come out of this project form an eclectic collection of objects. Made by press moulding clay into silicone moulds made on site, they are being released in short edition runs. They are objects which focus on the repetition of materials while acknowledging the individuality created through the time - each piece in the edition differing from the last through its firing process and surface treatment. They are as unique as the building they were made from. Each piece is accompanied by a certificate of authentication.

“CLAY holding/transforming/performing is a season of clay at the National Sculpture Factory. It celebrates clay as a fundamental and complex material. A key tenet of this clay season is to be witness to experts in moments of live practice, to look into the complexity of clay production and material negotiation. This season of clay presents the breadth of material practice from the skills of traditional practices to the urgency of this material vital to expressive and sculptural live practices. The programme of live practice and keynote live conversations will present deep insights into the production and elemental demands of this ancient and current material.”

I was one small part of this weekend festival, and I’m enormously grateful for being invited to take part by Nuala O’Donovan, and for everyone involved in the weekend and of course to Dobz and the amazing team at the National Sculpture Factory.

Photos by The National Sculpture Factory