A move to the southern most part of Ireland, a Gaeltacht off-shore island, 3 miles long and 1 mile wide. Oileán Chléire. A body of work in progress.

My practice has always had, in varying degrees of importance, the natural world in focus. Right back to when I was studying my undergraduate in London. But I’ve always lived and worked in the city, the previous 7 years being spent in two capital cities - London and Dublin. I began to crave the open air, to be able to feel the weather on my skin, to find some new life to inject into my practice that I was falling out of love with.

I left my studio in Dublin behind, I left my kilns and wheel and my beloved tools. I committed to a somewhat self directed residency for 5 months on Oileán Chléire, with support from the island with a workspace and Irish language, and support from the Creative Places West Cork Islands fund. My aim was to recenter myself and my practice, to play and to learn and to enjoy, to strip back who I was as an artist to just the core, just the unadorned. I had a loose plan - build some sort of mongrel hybrid kiln and make some work directly from the land of the island. To reimagine my practice in a completely different place.

Oileán Chléire is a Gaeltacht. It is an Irish speaking place. These places are important in the presevartion and rebuilding of the Irish language. Though I’m from Northern Ireland I did not speak any Irish before coming here, but through my time here I am taking lessons and incorporating the language into my practice. The titles for all the pieces throughout this project are the Irish place names for where they have come from on the island, these have been sourced from a book by Éamon Lankford, An Losainmníocht in Oileán Chléire. His book is an incredible piece of work that is recording the history of the place names on the island.

Carraig an tSáile

A quiet stone beach on the northern side of Chléire that looks out past Mizen Peninsula into the Atlantic, banks of jagged sandstone along its edges. This was the site of the first land cast I took, about 100x50cm section of the rockface immortalised in a pink silicone.

I wanted to capture details of the rocks without adjustment. I needed a material that was flexible to get around issues with undercuts and one that could be used multiple times to make from, so that I have plenty of room for learning. I landed on using a type of silicone that, once cured, could be used immediately as a type of press mould. There was a steep learning curve but the pieces began to emerge. These pieces, Carraig an tSáile, are wall hangings, they are a portrait of the island, of the very rocks that hold it above the ocean.

Carraig an tSáile, press moulded stoneware with beach stone inclusions, wild beach clay slip, wood fly ash, beach shell wadding, fired in a hybrid gas-wood-salt kiln on Oileán Chléire, various sizes.

These pieces are a full embodiment of their place, they utilise a range of materials from within a stone’s throw of each other. A cast of a rock face for the form. A wild clay deposit a meter away as a surface slip. Little pebbles from the beach mixed into the clay and embedded into the objects. Seaweed harvested from the ocean, dried and burnt and thrown through the kiln during the firing, to create a faux fly ash to help glaze the surfaces. Each step building more and more depth into the surfaces of the pieces and embedding their origin into each object. As I work I also build a relationship with the island, with the land and materials that it provides.

An Chathaoir Ríoga

A fallen rock, sitting amongst the grass on the verge of one of the roads on the island. From the waist of the island, the narrowest section that divides the island into its eastern and western parts. Slowly moved across the island to where I set up my rough and ready worksite. Dense and heavy, I was curious about the process of casting an enclosed three dimensional object, how would it translate across into ceramic, what should be replicated, and what should be played with? These pieces are large, their surfaces varying incredibly due to their size and placement in the kiln I built. These pieces have been made in a stoneware with some beach pebble inclusions, which burst and melt out of the surface, then they’ve been glazed in a matt white glaze to start building their surface details. Some parts stay underfired, the dusty chalky white glaze not fully melted, while other sides fire much hotter. These sides have glassy areas, rivulets of melted ash dripping down their surfaces and getting caught in the textures left from the rock they were cast from.

Above the cliff the original rock had fallen, there’s fields full of bracken, these plants shoot up in spring and take over, their fronds gently waving in any wind they can catch. I’ve been gathering and burning these plants, collecting their ashes in preparation to create a selection of glazes for these pieces, I’m working towards a selection of glazes of varying degrees of gloss and matt, variation across the surface, to try and contrast the pieces roadside rock origin and to emphasise the texture that the silicone casting has captured.

An Chathaoir Ríoga, press moulded stoneware with stone inclusions, wild beach clay slip, wood fly ash, beach shell wadding, fired in a hybrid gas-wood-salt kiln on Oileán Chléire, various sizes.

A field of bracken, the ones I’ve been gathering to collect their ashes for some glazes for some An Chathaoir Ríoga pieces. Using these hyper local materials for specific pieces is becoming a more and more important part of my practice. I want to connect my work to the places that it comes, whether its live casting land or making an interpretation of a place, the raw materiality of using materials I gather is a truly physical connection. The process of gathering, processing, and testing these materials is also a way for me to build a relationship with a place, it’s almost a form of meditation, and it serves as an important function of providing time for reflection on the work I’m making and the place that I am.

As time goes on and we all strive to reduce our impact on the world we’re living on, it’s becoming more and more important for me to reduce my own impact as much as I can. Producing any product will always have negative environmental consequences - but there are many steps that we can take to reduce this impact and move towards a sustainable way of working with clay. One of the ways of reducing our impact is through the materials we use, focusing on what we can source from around us, cutting out the airmails and industrial processing involved in the raw materials we use. I am at the beginning of this material journey and I can’t wait to continue to increase the range of local materials that I gather and process myself.

Béal Chuan Trá Chiaráin

A stark contrast to the natural that I’ve focused on in my time on Oileán Chléire. This is a small concrete wall on trá beag. This is on the northern side of the waist of the island, looking out into a sheltered bay known as south harbour. To access this stone beach you walk down along a gentle stream with some deposits of clay, downhill through the wildflowers, dominated by banks of yellow flag irises and bracken.

This wall is degrading, its integrity compromised and its internal rock-filled void exposed. The weather is harsh here, the winter storms coming in with incredible winds battering the island. The seasons feel more powerful here than in the city, or to me anyway, the relationship with them is more important, more present in the everyday. The wall feels surprisingly ephemeral, the textures captured from the silicone will soon be gone, capturing a moment in the arc of its existence on the island.

These pieces have began from where I landed with the Carraig an tSáile pieces, they are wall hangings, a portrait of a place. I’m currently working development of these into 3 dimensional free standing objects, something rock-like, perhaps with a reference back to bullauns, but with their texture kept centre stage.

Béal Chuan Trá Chiaráin, press moulded stoneware with stone inclusions, wild beach clay slip, wood fly ash, beach shell wadding, fired in a hybrid gas-wood-salt kiln on Oileán Chléire, various sizes.

Kiln

A big part of this project was a kiln - figuring out a way to fire on site with what I had - scrap wood and propane.

With the very generous help of Jess Jos, I built a temporary basic cross draught kiln with dry stacked dense kiln bricks and a flat removable 7” ceramic fibre lid on a rebar frame. It took a number of rebuilds, but in the end the kiln was fired 10 times through the duration of the project, before the salt from the seaweed ash and the scrap wood pile by the ocean finally ate through the ceramic fibre lid.

The firings took 12-16 hours to complete, starting ever so slowly to dry out the greenware before ramping up. For the first 800 degrees the kiln was just fired with gas, and then wood started to become introduced, becoming constant by the end of the firing. Between the temperatures of 1200c and 1260c ashes from specific local materials were blown through the kiln by pouring them into the firebox where the gas burners blew the ash throughout the kiln. The last hour of the firings are spent in a heavy reduction, before closing up for the night.

The bricks, now coated in a thick layer of salt and ash build up, are being reimagined in a future soda kiln of a different design. I’ll hopefully have it up and running by summer ‘24.

The residency came to an end in October 2023, yet I still find myself here. I’ve decided to stay on for a while longer, I’ve found something I want to explore and I’m not quite at the finish line for that yet. So I’ll continue to stay and work and gradually create a body of work that encapsulates my experience of working and living here.

I have also developed a range of functional objects for the home, you can read more about these over on COMING SOON