Time to celebrate Cork Craft Week
MY teacher, potter Orla O’Rourke, flings the ball of clay at the pottery wheel with expert accuracy.
It’s important the clay sticks well, she explains. Equally important is getting it centred, otherwise you will ‘fight the clay’ as you try to shape it out of its current ball form.
Elbows resting on thighs, squared firmly at the potting wheel I press on the accelerator and we are off. Orla cups her hands around my hands in an egg shape and we make a few futile attempts to fashion a unique (crap) piece of art.
There’s plenty of squelching and slopping and mess, which is fun, but ultimately, I don’t like the feeling of the course clay moving around in my hands. Orla displays generous patience as we chuck ball of clay after ball of clay at the potting wheel, the closest we get to creation is a sparse and basic bowl, so basic in fact the bottom comes off when we try to lift it off the wheel.
Orla (33) runs Stable Door Pottery at the Shanagarry Design Centre in east Cork.
A Ceramic Design graduate of the Crawford School of Art in Cork, she originally operated from a workshop and retail outlet fashioned from a converted shed and stables next to the family home just outside Dunmanway.
“That’s where the name (Stable Door) came from. We had horses growing up,” she says.
“For college it was horses or pottery – it was a toss up. But this way I get to keep both. I still have horses. I do sculptures of horses heads, which are really popular, but they take more time and work. So unless you get a specific commission, it’s easier to make the smaller scale stuff to keep things ticking over,” she says.
And things were turning over nicely for Orla until the downturn Her best sellers include hand built functional decorative pottery pieces, traditional slab rolled pottery with old Hessian fabric cloth hand rolled into each piece, (all hand painted).
“Things went very quiet, passing trade dried up. I had to make a decision, to give pottery one last try or give up,” she said.
Through a family connection, Orla moved from west Cork to east Cork and set up her studio at Shanagarry Design Centre four years ago.
Now, her work is stocked in outlets across the country, from Killarney to Donegal, Galway, Waterford and Dublin. “This year has been the best year so far, after Showcase Ireland in the RDS in January – a lot more shops have taken on my work,” she says.
For Cork Craft Month, Orla is offering two hour workshops, involving ceramic sculptures and hand building work producing little ceramic birdhouses and hanging wall features.
Beginning with a slab rolled piece of clay, students will cut it, design it and print it to shape, then sculpt it together to form the 3-D effect and add their own embellishments.
The pieces are then left to dry before being placed into the kiln for the first firing, also known as ‘bisque.’ Two weeks later, after a final firing at 1,240 degrees Celsius, the finished product (which is weather proof) is ready.
“People love the classes, the kids especially are amazed when they come out and see what they’ve done, to see what is possible,” Orla says.
In Cork city, glassmaker Jacinta Ryan of Boyran Glass will be conducting workshops set amongst the beautiful gardens of her olde world home in Ballintemple.
With a background in psychotherapy, Jacinta is relatively new to the process, which is hard to believe given the work she’s produced to date.
Introduced to glass fusing through a weekend workshop taught by glass artist Michael Ray, Jacinta fell in love with the process and stepped away from her former career to concentrate full time on her art work, together with her Boryan Glass partner, Laszlo Boros, who works with wood, metals and polished concrete to create one off pieces that compliment Jacinta’s creations. Their work is for sale at West Cork Crafts in Skibbereen.
Most recently, the pair teamed up to transform a metal garden table into a one-off water feature with coloured glass plates for Jacinta’s son’s wedding.
Her specialities include coloured ‘flowers’ mounted on metal rods that change with the light and sway in the wind, bowls, lamps and decorative wall hangings.
The pair are now collecting antique jugs and teapots for the next phase of their artistic partnership.
Taking a coloured piece of glass featuring a baby’s footprint, Jacinta suggests I make my own personalised piece.
She places two pieces of 4mm glass carefully on top of a hand print I’ve made in fine powder. One piece will form a bowl shape and the second piece will become a glass flower with my hand imprinted. The print is so fine it shows up the lines on my hand. We sift a selection of colours over the glass using a sieve and into the kiln it goes. The glass will turn red hot and melt into the powdered hand mould, casting its new shape. The process is quite cathartic. Jacinta’s enthusiasm and attention to detail is catching. And the setting, in an old Georgian house filled with art, makes this experience something really special.
*
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
