Tomnafinnoge Sculpture Symposium

I visited Tomnafinnoge Wood last week, on the last day of a sculpture symposium. Five sculptors had been working in the woods, in mostly fine weather, for the past ten days. From  left to right they are Con Gent, Niall O'Neill, Dave Kinane, Róisín Flood and James Hayes.

Niall O'Neill was busy at work on an enormous piece of fallen oak. The sculptors could only use hand tools in the forest, and could not damage living trees.

A local child enjoyed assisting Niall in brushing wood dust from the carving.

Con Gent carved an abstract face into one end of a large branching tree limb and the final touch was to stand it up as a tripod.

It appeared to be almost walking, spider-like through the woods.

Dave Kinane’s constructed sculpture was the culmination of ten days of measuring, hand-drilling holes, and carving custom dowels to put together numerous saplings into a curving, open-mesh structure.

Kinane's piece has an Irish title which tranlates to "The Sanctuary of the Hooded Crow". The sculpture is open-ended and may very well provide sanctuary to birds and other fauna in need.

Róisín Flood’s work also required calculated thought and meticulous awareness as she wove together branches into a curved structure, which will eventually disappear into the woods.

When I visited, Flood was applying finishing touches of ferns and moss in the hopes that animals may build comfortable homes within her piece.

In addition to O’Neill and Gent, James Hayes was also woodcarving. He carved two blocky caryatid figures into short columns and they seemed to provide a portal into a glade.

The figures. male and female, represent a duality within nature, both benign and malign in its disinterest.

 The carvings are roughly chiselled and appear both ancient and contemporary.

The concern for the environment and importance of craftsmanship was obvious in the work of the five artists on the symposium. Both local artists and the general community are hoping that this wood symposium will become a regular event.

ceramic handbuilt bowls

I made four bowls to go with my tulip dinnerware set, which can be seen in progress and finished here, here, here and here. A medium-size pudding bowl was used as a former (lined with cling film of course!).

You can see the feet on the bowls are made by two half-moon, measured slab pieces similar to the feet on the small plates in the set. They were affixed when the bowls were leather hard, in the usual manner of scoring and slipping.

I drew tulip designs on each bowl's exterior. I think the interiors will be the solid speckled turquoise glaze that I used for the background on the plates (so they will also connect with the backgrounds on the bowl exteriors). The speckled turquoise glaze has a bit of a rough texture, though, so I will also do a top coat of clear glaze to hopefully smooth it out.

A glaze firing was going to be put on, so I shelved these bowls, knowing that the glaze-painting of the designs would take a bit more time than I had. I quickly glazed a smaller, simpler bowl so it would go in that firing.

This turned out to be a good plan! Using only two glazes - fire engine red for the interior and rose gold for the exterior - my small terracotta bowl turned out quite lovely. I call it Libation Bowl. Though I am sure this is suitable for blood sacrifices, it will probably get most use as a peanut bowl. 

Summer bean salad!

It's Irish summer, which means -- maybe there'll be warm, dry days, maybe there'll be cold, wet days. In other words, not much change from weather any other season! As I write, it's cold, wet, grey and miserable. There was hail a couple of days ago. But last weekend was sunny, dry and quite warm, perfect for at least one bbq. I suspected it would be so, in advance, and started making my favourite summery bean salad. This is a simple recipe, though it has to be made in two stages, which means two days. It is perfect for making in anticipation of a bbq, but also works as a fresh veg accompaniment to any meal, or with pitta or crusty bread as a meal in itself.

Even though I say a two stage recipe, I really have to start the night before stage one as I prefer to use dried chick peas (garbanzo beans) and kidney beans, rather than canned. They need to be fully soaked and then boiled the next day. I always add some bay leaves when boiling; the flavour they add is subtle but the house sure smells nice while the beans are boiling!

The other stage one ingredients are an onion, red pepper, runner beans, vinegar, sunflower oil, sugar. Chop vegetables, and in a large bowl add 2 tlbsp vinegar, 4 tblsp oil, and 4-6 tblsp sugar. Cover and leave overnight, periodically stirring. I never have room in my fridge, but because I live in Ireland there are plenty of cool storage spaces. If you live in a country that has a hot summer, do be sure to refrigerate!

The next day drain and rinse well.

For the second stage dressing, which will stay in the salad, I go all out and use olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and brown sugar, but this is not necessary (so go ahead and continue to use sunflower oil, regular vinegar, white sugar). My version is just a little more special and decadent, but the original recipe I found did not use these ingredients.

Again, leave refrigerated overnight, stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper to your taste. This is an incredibly fresh and tasty salad.

Delicious tomato pizza sauce!

In my family, we all love pizza! With the final exam and the ending of school for the summer, I decided it would be a great treat to have homemade pizzas for dinner.

 This fairly simple sauce for pizza is only time consuming in that you have to wait for it to cool before whizzing in the food processor. So what I do is make the sauce in the morning, go about my day and whizz it just before I put together the pizzas in the evening. Anything left over can be frozen. I made my own pizza dough once the sauce was made, but everyone has their own favourite dough recipe or convenient store-bought pizza bases to use, so I am just concentrating on the sauce here.

The ingredients: 4 cans peeled tomatoes; small onion, garlic, oregano (fresh or dried), bay leaves, tomato purée (I just use half this tube), black pepper, about 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar, and some oil for sautéeing onion and garlic before adding the rest of the ingredients. Cook it all up for about 20 mins to half an hour. Cool and remove the bay & oregano leaves before processing to make a smooth sauce. This amount made about 3 ice cream tub containers, which was plenty to cover four cookie trays of pizza! In fact, less than half the sauce was actually used, so I put the rest in the freezer for next time.

I use cookie trays and bake the pizza in the oven for about 20 mins at 180C, for thin crusted pizza. Everyone has their own favourite toppings, but I put the sauce down first and add the grated mozzarella last, over whatever toppings I want on my pizza as the mozzarella browns a bit, which I like. Delicious delish! If there is any leftover pizza, it also tastes great warmed up the next day.

Für Elise

It's taken a number of years, but I have finally gotten around to making the book that I started planning as a gift for my child several years ago!

In the ceramics workshop a couple of years ago I created book covers for a small accordion book. I  impressed lace on the clay and used a stamp set to put my name on the back cover before the covers went in the bisque fire. I glazed the covers, brought them home - and forgot about them! I kept remembering my plans to make the gift just before xmas and birthday every year, but never having the time to actually make the gift!

As with my other books using ceramic covers, I knew that I first had to glue some paper to the insides of the covers to ease the affixing of the final accordion drawing. Prior to doing this, I threaded some garden wire through the back holes; this would provide an element with which to close the book.

This year, remembering once again too late, I decided it would just be a late gift and took my time about it. The gift was actually quite simple: the first few bars of Beethoven's beautiful song Für Elise would comprise a transcribed drawing. The only decision I had to make was colour and media.

I drew the piece in pencil first and finally decided on pen and coloured inks. While I was careful in my transcription, I also thought that smudges may lend some authenticity to my drawing so did not pressure myself to be perfect.

Für Elise, 10 cm x 10 cm, accordion-fold book, ink on acid-free papers, ceramic covers, plastic-coated garden wire, 2019.

Home Project continues...

I've done some more work on the "Home" project. The "House with the Green Door" was the second house I lived in. My family moved there when I was two and we left when I was four but I still have quite a lot of memories from that place! As I mentioned last week, this house was across the road from St Martin's, the school that my older siblings went to. I specifically remember playing in the schoolyard one day, it must have been on the weekend, and I had to climb over a tree that had fallen in the storm the night before (perhaps it was hit by lightning?); I got a splinter in one of my fingers from the tree bark and ran home crying.

With the help of google streetview, I did sketches of all the places (including apartment buildings) but for now I will skip those sketches and jump ahead to my emigration to Ireland in 1988! My parents had already returned "home" five years previously, so were well ensconced. At that time I was still dithering about where I wanted to be, but I lived with my parents in the middle of Bray town on and off for about 2 years.

Then I moved back to Ireland at the end of 1993 with my partner (now my husband). We moved down to rural Kerry in early 1994 and the house we rented, beside a small humpback bridge in a small village, was a renovated traditional cottage. We lived there nearly a year and a half.

Loathe to leave the beautiful Kerry, we found a farmouse to rent near Portmagee. I couldn't sketch it from google streetview as it is not visible from the road! I found this photograph of myself and my husband in the field in front of our yellow farmhouse. The summer of 1995 was a glorious one, and I recall having regular swims in Portmagee Channel (the water and Valentia Island can be seen in the distance. We simply had to go for a walk in the field behind our house and we were upon our own private beachfront.

After my Dad died in September 1995, my husband and I were travelling frequently between Bray and Kerry. It was an exhausting drive in an old banger that could not accelerate to pass rural traffic. We moved back to Bray in the fall of 1996 to a house that was available just a few doors away from my Mum. Being part of the same terrace, this house mirrored my Mum's house, though it didn't have the renovations that my Dad had completed. We lived in this house for a good few years, until our daughter was born in 2002 and we moved to the edge of town - where we have been since!

Home Project!

A couple of months ago I had a dream in which a friend gifted me some prints. I thought the prints quite beautiful and interesting. Both prints seemed abstract, but on closer inspection I realised they weren't. In the first print, overlapping layers of translucent colour were actually house forms, where each house was a different colour. In the second print, I realised the Rorschach-type blob was actually the same as the first print, except instead of translucent colourful houses, each house was printed opaquely monotone, such that only the outline was identical to the first print. I decided I should do these prints and made a sketch.

In thinking about the new project, I also thought the houses should have personal meaning for me and decided that I would research all the places that I have lived. I have lived in 19 different houses during my life, in Ireland and in Canada, for both short periods (1 month) and long (18 years). With the help of Google maps/streetview I began the research sketches of my homes. The house I lived in for the firt 2 years of my life was in "Cabbagetown" (so named because it was a huge area for Irish immigrants) in Toronto. Despite only being a baby and small toddler in this house, I have a surprising number of memories associated with it. Most significantly is the colour of the door: red.

My family, still remaining in "Cabbagetown", moved to a different house. The house with the green door. My siblings went to the school across the road from this house and "Walter's" was the cornershop up the street. Riverdale Zoo was only a block away, as was a cemetery and a playground park. Again, even though I was very young and only lived there for two years, I have very strong, specific memories associated with this house. While my siblings were at school one day, my Mum was watching a "parade" of some sort on tv. Suddenly I realised she was upset and crying. I was three years old. John F Kennedy was shot.

We moved to The Beach (now called The Beaches) in the east end of Toronto in 1964. I grew up in this house, spending the next 18 years there. I moved out for good the year before my parents fulfilled their constant wish - to retire early and return to Ireland.

I still have two more homes to sketch out of the nineteen, but I wanted to have an idea about colour and translucency. Using tissue paper I sketched the houses and started cutting them out (I have always loved cut-outs!).

 After cutting out the houses, the project started to develop legs. I no longer thought of it as solely a print project, but could imagine other media as well.

Starting at the beginning:
The House with the Red Door, oilstick & graphite on wood, 23.5 cm x 15.5 cm.