Ireland’s heart of gold and silver

Finding Joseph Walsh’s studio outside the rural two-pub village of Riverstick was trying. Cell reception was spotty, and many of the addresses were written as names instead of numbers. But when I finally drove through the Walsh-designed wooden gates – I saw the search was worth it. Inside his 17th-century thatch-roofed cottage and workshop, half a dozen woodworkers were forming slices of ash trees into loops, curls, waves and lines. The furniture resembled calligraphy, and seemed like nothing less than expressions of pure joy.

The day before, I’d been in Kilkenny, talking to the CEO of the Design and Craft Council of Ireland, an organization that supports and promotes some of Ireland’s top craftspeople and their handiwork. Flipping through the pages of their catalogue, I saw many gorgeous items from all over the nation, including hand-made felt, hammered silver and gold, leather, iron, clay and wicker work. But two photos — one of a couple of shelves and another of a low table  — were like bolts out of the green. I’d never seen furniture like that before. And, as I soon discovered, I’d never met a furniture maker like Joseph Walsh.

Walsh led me into his cottage, which was fitted with the type of furniture he grew up with: a roughhewn but sturdy wooden table, hutch and set of chairs. How he got from this humble decor to the masterpieces in his workshop parallels the story of how Irish crafts as a whole evolved from a profusion of Claddagh rings and Connemara crosses to the utterly original work I saw in that catalogue.

Growing up on the family farm, woodworking tools were the only ones Walsh’s father let him use, and he started making hutches and tables as they were needed around the house. Soon the neighbours noticed. He got his first commission at 15, and as his shapes got more ambitious, so did his prices. Now his chairs (his least expensive pieces) go for 12K euro, while his tables average 150K euro. Special orders like the 8m-high bed he just delivered to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire run quite a bit more.

While those prices are more or less unique in the nation, the 36-year-old craftsman is more fundamentally part of a movement that was spurred by the economic growth of the Celtic Tiger years (1995 to 2000), bolstered by the crash that followed when the 2008 recession took hold and has been infused with inspiration from the international designers that have come to Ireland over the years. Local craftspeople across the country – and specifically in the south – are moving away from the traditional idea of Irish crafts, which have been kitchified almost beyond recognition. They’re re-finding the heart of gold- and silversmithing, weaving and sculpting. It’s all small scale, and it owes more to Ireland’s actual history than to the international perception of it.

For example, the gold and silver work Neil Kelly and his father, James Mary, is most proud of  — and, significantly, sells the best — manages to be Irish without any overt reference to the sort of Irishness you might find in souvenir shops. The jewellery in his shop across the street from Kilkenny Castle looks rugged but is finely worked; rings and cufflinks with lines that are clean but never straight are testaments to forms made by hand, not by mould or machine.

The fact that Kelly had gone into his father’s business was not an anomaly. Just down the street, Christopher Heltzel works in the shop created by his father, Rudolf, who came to Ireland from Berlin in 1966 as part of the Kilkenny Design Workshop, a radical and profoundly effective programme that ran from 1965 to 1988, reinvigorating the Irish arts through contact with foreign masters. Christopher now makes and sells his own work, including some based on his father’s designs. They are ebullient 1960s confections that express the same sort of joy, often in oddly similar shapes, as Walsh’s tables.

Thirty kilometres southeast of Heltzel and Kelly, Philip Cushen has been running Cushendale Woollen Mills, a company set up by his great-great grandfather, since 1963. Though it’s a big operation — you can find shops throughout Ireland and beyond — the company is run how it always has been. They buy raw wool, then comb, spin, dye and weave it themselves on entirely mechanical (as opposed to electronic) equipment.

The first few generations of Cushens made their living and their reputation on blankets and basic garments for families and uniforms for the army. As a result, they didn’t have much use for colour. But all that changed with the Kilkenny Design Workshop (the epochal forerunner to the Design and Craft Council), when Irish designers looked to foreign makers for inspiration.

“Suddenly there were designers from other countries, there were some English designers, some American designers, there had been some Scandinavian designers,” Cushen said. “They came out with new colours that would blow your mind away; they were using magentas and very bright oranges.”

Foreign involvement in modern Irish craft continues to be significant. While traveling in Ireland, I ran into a Hungarian paper-maker, a Sicilian stone carver and a German couple who were, respectively, a basket weaver and a potter. All of them had been in Ireland for years, and all of them planned to stay.

Polish Kate Ramsey, who married an Englishman before moving to Ireland, turned to felt making – a relatively easy craft – to make some money during the doldrums after the Celtic Tiger crashed. In her workshop at the Limerick Craft Hub, she showed me how the technique just involves a strip of silk, some lengths of spun wool, some water and a couple of hand sanders. She’s fashioned the basic material into half a dozen scarf designs, and after only a few years into the business, she gets regular orders for as much as 40K euro, filling shops around the country, including the airport duty free.

Interestingly, the economic crash that put so many people out of work has proven to be the catalyst for another Irish craft renaissance. Ironmonger Eric O’Neill left behind his career as a builder to sell hand-made fireplace implements and coat racks through the Limerick Craft Hub. Eric Byrne was an industrial stone mason who, after his business dried up, turned to the craftier end of his trade, and now makes clocks, cheeseboards, egg cups and flatware out of Connemara marble, Kilkenny limestone and Wicklow granite with his partner at Hennessy & Byrne in County Wicklow.

I asked all the craftspeople I met, immigrant and native alike, what they thought about making their living as a craftsman. The best answer may have been Walsh’s.

“Growing up on a farm, life is working, and your social life overlaps with work,” he said. “[For example,] going to a market on Monday is a social thing most farmers would look forward to, and yet it’s where you buy and sell your stuff … In a way, workshop life is a little bit like that. You’re kind of working together, bringing people on, developing their skills. Clients get to live with the finished object, and we get to live every day making them, which is a very nice and usually good quality of life in 2015.”