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The Tree Project: Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill
77 Plays11 months ago
Cóilín Ó Dubhghaill is a silversmith producing work that explores vessel forms through a study of process, materials and colour.
Cóilín trained at Grennan Mill craft school and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1996. He subsequently worked as a designer for industry in India, the Philippines, and the UK, and set up a workshop in Kilkenny, Ireland.
In 1998, he moved to Tokyo, to study in the metalwork department at the National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geidai), receiving a doctorate in 2005.
From 2007-2019, Cóilín worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University. He currently lectures in the School of Design at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.
He exhibits his work internationally and has pieces in collections including the National Museum of Ireland, the Goldsmiths’ Collection, London, and the Marzee collection, Netherlands.
During her time as Head of Jewellery & Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art, renowned jeweller and educator Dorothy Hogg MBE inspired students in the workshop and beyond. For more information on Dorothy Hogg, the project and participants, visit: www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org/tree-project.
Hosted by Ebba Goring
Edited & Produced by Eda Obermanns
Cover Image by Shannon Tofts
Music: Precious Memories by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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Transcript
Introduction to The Tree Project Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Tree Project, Dorothy Hogg Life and Legacy podcast series. I'm Emma Goring from the Scottish Goldsmiths Trust and this podcast series has been developed to highlight the impact and legacy of the late Dorothy Hogg MBE
00:00:18
Speaker
her influential time leading the jewellery and silversmithing department at Edinburgh College of Art. The participants in this project were selected by Dorothy alongside her friend Curator Amanda Gain.
Selection Process and Additional Resources
00:00:30
Speaker
For more information on this podcast and all those involved please head over to our website www.scottishgoldsmithstrust.org
00:00:42
Speaker
In this episode, I'm joined by Colleen O'Doul. Thanks for joining me. Let's start with introductions and what it is that you do now.
Colleen O'Doul: Journey into Metalworking
00:00:50
Speaker
My name's Colleen O'Doul. I'm a lecturer in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and I work in the, it's the Department of Design for Body and Environment. And within that, we run a Jewellery and Objects programme. So it's quite similar to the Jewellery and Silver Smithing programme that we would have had in Edinburgh.
00:01:08
Speaker
I graduated from Edinburgh in 1996. I'm still a practicing metalworker, silversmith, and at the moment I'm just setting up a workshop at home. So since I moved back to Dublin, I've been moving around into different workshop buildings. It's a challenge to find a workshop. So when a city, when an economy is doing well, it's always hard for the artist to find workshops. So I'm building my own workshop at the moment.
00:01:33
Speaker
Thinking back into your time at Edinburgh College of Art, describe for us that time you spent there. What are the things that you remember? It could be details, the sounds, the smells, the quirks of it, but also what interested you in specialising in jewellery and silversmithing can also reflect a little bit about your relationship with Dorothy and the other staff members there.
Specializing in Silversmithing: Influences and Atmosphere
00:01:55
Speaker
I guess when I went to Edinburgh I was initially thinking of doing painting or doing sculpture. I think probably when I first went in I was looking at painting and then during the first year we did the block and sculpture and I was really intrigued by the challenges working in three dimensions. And then I did the block of silversmithing and jewellery up in the jewellery department with Dorothy and
00:02:20
Speaker
then I very quickly made my mind up that that's what I was going to specialise in. I think it was probably the sort of attention to detail about the materials and processes that I really liked. It was a very atmospheric department as well when you walked in, all the flames on the benches, all the torches with their pilot lights burning, and a general kind of error of industriousness and busyness about the place. And I think they really put a lot of effort into teaching the first years.
00:02:47
Speaker
A lot of enthusiasm and attention. And Dorothy used to come down and help teach that block, which she saw as an important activity for recruitment. But it made a good impression on you as a first-year coming in that she was interested in what you were doing. I was in the class of maybe about 10 students.
00:03:04
Speaker
and I was the only one who specialized in silversmithing so I think it was during the third year or maybe towards the end of the second year we could choose so at that point I would have been working a good lot with Bill Kirk and Bill was a really excellent craftsman, quite a strict kind of severe guy but a really really excellent craftsman that we were lucky
Inspirations and International Studies
00:03:24
Speaker
to work with. Bill would have been the one teaching me about silversmithing techniques like raising and hammering and things like that so
00:03:30
Speaker
At that point, from that point onwards, I was more focused on the sort of objects and the sheet metal work then on jewellery, as in things that would go in the body. And at the time, we did a lot of drawing in the programme, which really suited me. So I actually chose to do illustration as a second subject as well. So I was doing even more drawing than the rest of the students.
00:03:52
Speaker
We could choose to go off to places to do drawing and research for the day. So one place I went to was the shipyards in Glasgow. Dorothy had I think was a friend for husbands who worked there so she was able to fix up to get me access to the shipyards for the day so I could go down there drawing. That was an interesting one to see how they were building the modular construction of these massive ships was really intriguing.
00:04:16
Speaker
In another place I spent a lot of time was in the museum down in Chambers Street. I was particularly intrigued with all the inlaid Iranian metal work down there, so that kind of came through in my degree show work, looking at how you could inlaid different colours of metal into each other. Thinking back, were there any kind of projects or visiting lectures that stayed with you, influenced what you do now?
Dorothy Hogg's Teaching Approach
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, I know as a teacher now, we get to the VLN and they bring a sparkle of magic, their enthusiasm and joy. The students all perk up when they get to meet these shiny new people. We had a great range of people coming in to work with us in Edinburgh. One person in particular was Mizuko Yamada, a Japanese metalworker and jeweller who came and did a talk when I was in my final year in Edinburgh. I think Mizuko at the time was doing a residency down at the RCA in London.
00:05:07
Speaker
and she came up to visit ECA and did a lecture. Subsequently, Musco came back and spent time working at Edinburgh as a resident. After I left Edinburgh, worked for a few years and then I was thinking about going back to do master's study. I thought back to where, you know, where could I go to? I was quite interested in going to study in Germany, perhaps.
00:05:26
Speaker
But then I thought about Mizuko's lecture and the fantastic metalwork that she'd shown in Japan. So they were doing large-scale, three-dimensional, free-form hammerwork in the art school in Tokyo where Mizuko had studied. Say the work I'd been doing with Bill Kirk was symmetrical, round forms mainly.
00:05:43
Speaker
So the idea that you could do kind of free-form non-semetical hammer work was really intriguing to me. And then the other thing in Japan was they were doing lots of inlay and working with different kinds of colours of metal and things like that. So I was very interested to study there and I contacted Musiko. She made an introduction for me to one of the lecturers in the art college and then that helped me a lot on my getting to go to Japan to study.
Post-Graduation Adventures and Influences
00:06:09
Speaker
It's interesting there's kind of themes that have arisen through just even having the first interviews and one of them was Dorothy's sort of very individual approach with her students and how she could identify the different ways that people are learning and opportunities for them. Whether they were wanting to be a silversmith or a jeweller or do something completely different, she was still very much supportive of that. Is there anything you would like to reflect on the style of teaching or the kind of ethos in the department?
00:06:38
Speaker
Others have mentioned having to be in there from dawn till dusk, kind of working away. I don't know if you have any other reflections about the way that you were taught. There was definitely a high expectation of attendance and engagement with the programme, which was good. Particularly that year group that I was in, there was a lot of really driven people in it. Maeve and Nicola, who you've already interviewed. So it was a great cohort to be with. Maeve in particular used to come in really early in the morning. I was very impressed at the time.
00:07:05
Speaker
I remember Dorothy telling me that she would get up at it was something like six in the morning or half five and she'd work at her bench for an hour or two before coming into college so this was her time in the morning when it was peaceful at home and she'd do a bit of work at the bench before coming in and I remember being impressed by that that this was
00:07:22
Speaker
determined to carve out some time to kind of continue her own working practice. It was strict and there was an expectation but there was a lot of kind of pastoral care as well. I think Dorothy was very kind and encouraging with students and things like that and she'd kind of check in with you to see how you were doing so that was good. I think she put a lot of effort in to try and encourage people after they graduated too and that was and is unusual.
00:07:45
Speaker
that somebody would take the time to do that. It's such a busy job that you're consumed by your present students. So to kind of reach out and make connections for your past students as well, that was a very generous thing that she was taking the time to do that. Now thinking about your career pathway from that moment of graduating, you've mentioned that you went to do your master's in Tokyo. Tell us a bit more about that and then how you got to where you are now.
00:08:13
Speaker
I finished in Edinburgh in 1996 and then for about two or three years I was working in lots of different kinds of jobs. I spent some time in India in the Philippines designing in industry and factories in the silverware factory in India and then the furniture factory in the Philippines and I was working
00:08:29
Speaker
back in Ireland I worked in a sculpture foundry in Dublin for a while doing big public sculpture and in a jewellery factory doing production jewellery like Celtic jewellery work for a lot of it being exported to the United States, clatter rings and things like that and I was thinking about you know going back and doing some more study as I mentioned earlier it was I
00:08:50
Speaker
thought back to the lecture that Misako Yamada had
Metalwork Studies in Tokyo
00:08:53
Speaker
done. So Misako kindly introduced me to Professor Miyata, who was the head of the department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, as it was called at the time. In Japanese it's shortened to Tokyo Gedai.
00:09:07
Speaker
And that's the oldest art school in Japan. It goes back to the 1870s, I think it is. When they set up the craft departments there, the first people who were running the metalwork department in the chokin department, those guys had been making sword furniture for the samurai, you know, the samurai armor. So it had this very old kind of metalwork history that goes back into the Edo period. They were still teaching a lot of those old traditional processes, but in a very sort of the modern take on it.
00:09:37
Speaker
So the metalwork department there was split up into three areas. It was choke-in, juke-in and tank-in. So choke-in is the metal carving department. They'd specialise in inlaying and mixed-coloured metalwork processes and recousé techniques. So those guys would have originally been making the sword furniture. Today they'd be making things more like jewellery and small objects.
00:10:00
Speaker
and then they had a chukin department which was metal casting and they would have been the workers who were making say like buddhist statues back in in the past nowadays they're making you know modern cast sculptures however they use an old process where they make the casting molds out of clay
00:10:17
Speaker
so it's a sort of a handmade rather than using say like ceramic shell or high temperature plasters they're using this very recyclable clay material that you know similar to what would have been done hundreds years ago so I was in the tanking department which is the a silversmithing and blacksmithing department so they were doing hammer work in sheath metal and also iron work those guys their history would have gone back to the people who were making armor
00:10:43
Speaker
If you look at the samurai armor that you'd see in a museum, all those face guards, they're three-dimensional. They're made out of quite thin sheet metalwork and they're hammered and raised in the same way that you'd make a teapot or something like that. So in the department, we had a display covered there. Rather than having teapots or things like that, they had these original different stages of how you would make a samurai face mask at a thin sheet of iron.
00:11:07
Speaker
Within that department in the kind of fifties in the post-war fifties and sixties, the tutors in the department were making animals in copper and iron and things like that. So these were things maybe say 30, 40 centimeters high, that kind of size. And then around in the 1970s in that department, they started to work with TIG welding and that enabled them to work really big. So a lot of the tutors while I was there, they were making.
00:11:33
Speaker
big sculpture, the kind of size of stuff that you put outside a train station, you know, many meters high. But with that hammered sort of sheet metalwork process, so really large scale animals and figurative sculpture using silversmithing techniques, but on a sort of a massive scale.
00:11:49
Speaker
within the training program we do things like make animals out of one sheet of metal so while I was there they brought rabbits into the department for a week so we had loads of rabbits running around the place you had to draw the rabbits and then you make a clay model of the rabbits and then from your clay model you'd make a fiberglass copy of it so this is something that you could kind of
00:12:11
Speaker
keep and work with for a couple of months as you took a big sheet of copper, a big oval kind of shape sheet of copper and hammered it up into the shape of this this rabbit so it would take about two months and I guess I was intrigued by the ability to do that kind of freeform work but I also having worked in the bronze foundry in Dublin I knew that that it would be a difficult thing to bring back to Europe
00:12:35
Speaker
It's such a slow method of working that the person paying for it would have to really understand and buy into the heritage of it.
Glasgow Career Highlights
00:12:44
Speaker
It's a beautiful way of working making that massive sheet metal work, but I think it is a bit slower and more difficult than casting processes.
00:12:52
Speaker
While I was there, I specialised in more vessels and things like that, and I got really into the whole coloured metalwork area, so that's when I did a doctorate there and did research about how all the colouring and patternation techniques and that, and I was looking at doing sort of multi-coloured inlaid phases and things like that with different kinds of metals combined together.
00:13:11
Speaker
I just love that image of those rabbits and everyone drawing them and everyone having to make them in all these different materials. That's fascinating. I had heard about the training a bit in Japan, but not the detail like that. Thinking now after your time in Japan, what happened next?
00:13:28
Speaker
So I finished my doctorate in 2005 and I was searching around for some employment and I got offered two jobs, one in Savannah, Georgia and one in Glasgow in Scotland teaching and doing some research in the art school there. In the end, I think I was thinking about the climate that Savannah, Georgia might be a nicer, nicer climate to live in. But in the end, it was in the interview in Glasgow with Jack Cunningham. He was very encouraging about me continuing my own practice and very interested in what I was doing.
00:13:55
Speaker
That was what drew me to Glasgow. So I worked in Glasgow for about two and a half years. It was a great city to work in. Really, I loved working in the York College, working opposite the Mackintosh building. And it was a real treat to be able to go in. It's such a shame what happened there subsequently. I was working with Anna Gordon while I was there, who's also an ECIE graduate. She's head of the department now.
00:14:16
Speaker
It was a really fruitful time when I was working in Glasgow. I got involved in a number of commissions while I was there, one of which was through the incorporation of Goldsmiths, the Silver of the Stars project, where 10 silversmiths based in Scotland or Scottish silversmiths were paired up with 10 Scottish celebrities. And I was paired up with Billy Connolly. And Billy had just finished making a TV show in Australia where he'd gone around Australia on a three wheeled Harley trike.
00:14:43
Speaker
At the time I was living in Partik in Glasgow near where Billy had grown up and I had read his biography as part of the research and there was also a Harley dealer in that part of Glasgow so I was able to go down to the dealer and spend time drawing their bikes and studying the motorbikes which was really useful.
00:14:59
Speaker
So I designed up a teapot which was based on the teardrop gas tank of the motorbike and also like a sugar bowl that was based on the headlights and there was various kind of components that inspired this motorbike teapot so it was good fun got some lovely pictures of Billy Connolly with the teapot on his swing in his house in Scotland so that was that was a really nice way to finish the project.
00:15:22
Speaker
As part of that project we got to travel a good bit for the exhibition opening so I got to go to one in the Hermitage in St Petersburg in Russia which was a real treat and curators took us back into the storerooms in the back of the Hermitage where they've got these phenomenal metalwork collections from all across Russia really amazing. So besides the joy of the commission and the experience of making that we've got some some great access in some of the places that we went to for the opening so it was really great project.
00:15:49
Speaker
Another commission I did there was to make a chalice for St. Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow and it was one of the reverence there had passed away and he had been very involved in kind of ecumenical mattresses in the city of Glasgow, cross-community projects and things like that. So his widow was very keen on Irish silversmith making something for the Cathedral in Glasgow that was very touching to go along to the service where they were using it for the first time and to see something that he'd spent months making and to see
00:16:17
Speaker
I guess a lot of modern silversmithing maybe doesn't get used. Often they get put on display. So it's great to make something that's genuinely being used every week and is, you know, where the function and the ritual is really important to the design of the object. After your time in Glasgow, you mentioned before in a previous conversation about doing a bit of a residency in Edinburgh.
Research and Collaborations in Edinburgh and Beyond
00:16:41
Speaker
While I was studying in Japan, I was doing research on how these traditional alloys and patternation processes were done in Japan. I was looking at Japanese language sources and talking to shokunin, the traditional Japanese craftspeople who are experts in that area. Some Japanese craftspeople do that patternation themselves, and then some people get experts who just do the finishing patternation works. I was talking to those people.
00:17:07
Speaker
and also getting a lot of really good support from the professors in the art college. The other part of the research I wanted to do was to look at how those materials and processes had spread outside of Japan. So in the 1800s, after Japan opened up in the 1850s, there was various European experts were brought into Japan to help them modernize their mining and military and things like that.
00:17:32
Speaker
So there was a published accounts by these people of the time they spent in Japan describing the kind of metalwork processes and their interactions with Japanese craftspeople and things like that. So you have people like say Christopher Dresser went to Japan and he collected a lot of Japanese metalwork and because of his expert knowledge he was writing down what he was looking at with a lot of detail.
00:17:52
Speaker
And then say his collections of metalwork were subsequently sold on to Tiffany, who then did big collections of Mokumegane work and Japanese kind of inlaid inspired metalwork, which they won loads of prizes for in the 1890s and up to around 1900.
00:18:08
Speaker
Tiffany and Christoph and people like that were doing work inspired by that. I wanted to go back and look at the original sources and research and papers that these people had published. So I went to Edinburgh for a couple of months and did a residence in the art college, which enabled me to access the National Museum of Scotland. That was a really good opportunity to do that kind of European-based research while also began to continue doing a bit of my own practice in the art college and making there.
00:18:33
Speaker
and then reconnecting with people in Scotland. So it was a really fun time and a nice opportunity to hang out with Dorothy and Sue and Grant McCabe was working there at the time and so it's a good time to be in Edinburgh. So nice to hear about that time going back to the department, sort of touchstone if you like. Were you doing any teaching there and do you think your experience in Japan inspired others to do the same?
00:19:00
Speaker
I did do some lecturing there. I actually, I did some lecturing the year after I left Edinburgh in 1997. Dorothy invited me to do a little bit of teaching. So straight away, she had me in doing bits of teaching with her, which was really nice. You need to sort of build up your CV to get these opportunities. So getting little bits of encouragement like that really helped me get work in the future. I did some lecturing while I was doing that residency, some teaching, and I did some talks about Japan.
00:19:25
Speaker
And then subsequently, when I was working in Glasgow, Dorothy did a little one day mini symposium about Japanese metalwork and Musico was back over and both of us did talks. And I know that there are very good links between Scotland and Japan. So Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, the staff have very strong links with Japan doing exhibitions and educational links and Japanese students coming to study in Scotland and vice versa. So, yeah, hopefully me talking about that did encourage and make it seem more accessible to people.
00:19:57
Speaker
mentioned about doing some work in the Philippines and I know that Maeve and Nicola also mentioned that and they mentioned it as something that they got to do from a contact that Dorothy had. Was yours something separate or was that an opportunity that you got through being at Edinburgh College of Arts?
00:20:14
Speaker
Yeah, it was a contact Dorothy had who was supplying, I think it was like industrial advice to a company in the Philippines, so equipment and advice. The guy at their pride, he was looking for designers to bring into the company. They were making all kinds of furniture, sort of luxury furniture with the strong kind of, it was a mixture of sort of European style furniture and Asian influence furniture and objects made out of local materials like rattan and coconut shell inlays and things like that as well. So it was a wide range of stuff.
00:20:44
Speaker
He was particularly interested in developing new surface finishing techniques and patination and just trying to bring in a fresh eye in terms of making in the factory. The funny thing in the factory was they were making their own saw blades. So from a jeweller's perspective, this is a story I like to tell to the students when they're starting to use jeweller saw blades as they snap hundreds of them. In jewellery, we use these really fine saw blades, which are about as thick as a thread and they're extremely easy to snap.
00:21:13
Speaker
So when you're starting off, you break loads of them. And in this factory, it was Cebu, which is right in the middle of the Philippines. And although it has a big tourist industry, it's fairly remote. There was a guitar factory on the island. So they would get guitar strings, steel guitar strings from the factory, and a tiny little chisel, and chisel little teeth into the guitar strings to make their own saw blades. So they're lovely saw blades. So they were round back on them and great for it, doing trick and inlay work and things like that.
00:21:40
Speaker
but if you snapped one you had to spend five or ten minutes making yourself a new saw blade. That really impressed me how quickly these guys could make their saw blades and also how long they could make them last.
Innovations in Metalwork Processes
00:21:53
Speaker
Thinking where we left off with you teaching at Glasgow with Jack Cunningham, what happened after that?
00:22:01
Speaker
I was working in Glasgow. I was looking for a way to continue the research I've been working on in Japan. And initially I looked at setting up a research project between Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow under the Art and Humanities Research Council grants. The feedback from the AHRC at the time was that they really liked the project that we were proposing, but they didn't see the link between the art school and the university as being strong enough.
00:22:26
Speaker
and I asked around and a few people suggested to me that Sheffield would be a great place to do that project. So I contacted Sheffield Hallam University and within the one faculty they had the art college area including a really good metalworking junior department and they also had an engineering department which had a material science research institute in it.
00:22:47
Speaker
So that made it really easy to set the project up and it would be well supported with all the relevant kind of equipment and knowledge. I ended up being introduced to a researcher there called Howell Jones, a Welsh material scientist. And Howell had just finished a project developing non-tarnishing silver alloys with one of the big silverware companies in Sheffield.
00:23:06
Speaker
So he was very enthusiastic and had a lot of knowledge and expertise in that area. You're looking at the very top thin surface layer of the metal and how the oxides form or how the colours develop on it. So he just spent quite a few years working on projects like that. So it really made sense to base the project there. So I moved down to Sheffield and ended up initially just for three years but ended up staying there for 12 years.
00:23:29
Speaker
it's a great city for metal workers full of sort of silversmiths and silversmithing firms so you've got all the subsidiary trades you've got spinners and polishers and platers and you've got some big manufacturing companies who have things like big rollers so when we were doing the alloy research we were able to
00:23:46
Speaker
get ingots continuously cast and then rolled out into large format sheets and things that that'd be quite hard to do anywhere else in the UK really maybe down in Birmingham a bit I think on a European scale Sheffield is quite unique in the kind of mixture of trades that it has and the sort of work you can do there.
00:24:04
Speaker
While I was there I was working in Yorkshire Art Space, which is a really great facility in the city with a load of Silversmiths. We've got Chris Knight, Maria Hansen, Brett Payne, Keith Tyson. We've got the Silversmith Starter Studio. You've got a load of early career, mid-career and kind of more senior Silversmiths and a very supportive community. So lots of ability to sort of get advice from people and
00:24:27
Speaker
Also, you can work there late at night hammering, making loud noises and using flame. That's quite a hard thing to replicate. I think Sheffield is probably more forgiving for that kind of noisy work than other cities because of the history of the place. While I was in Sheffield, in terms of the making I was doing, initially I was working a lot with those alloys. It was great because of the industry in Sheffield. I was able to access some big rollers and big bits of sheet in these unusual alloys.
00:24:55
Speaker
copper and gold alloy, chi bui chi, copper silver alloy. So the first pieces I was making were raised and sunk bowls, so working with quite thick sheet and hammering bowls, so stretching them out, thinning them out, sinking them, trying to look at different kinds of ways of patternating them using the traditional formulas, trying to develop sort of patterns on the surface of the metal and things like that.
00:25:16
Speaker
I was working with these alloys, baking different kinds of colored bowls with patterns on them. We started to look at how can we find other ways to join these different types of metal together. So me and Harold went to visit a research institute in Sheffield which specialised in welding and joining techniques. I think we were going to look at the sintering processes they had, like powder metal sintering processes.
00:25:41
Speaker
and on the way out of the factory the guy who's shown us around said oh have you ever seen friction stir welding it's a process they use for joining aluminium together where they get something like a blunt tool in a milling machine and drive it down into the metal so it looks something like a blunt drill bit you can imagine it sticks down into the metal and because the tool is pressing against the metal it heats the metal up until it's red hot
00:26:04
Speaker
And then this tool can traverse through the metal, spinning. Can imagine like clay or something like that. The metal when it gets hot is plastic in the way that clay would be soft so you can mix it together. And it can join sheets together. So it's great for things like trains or airplanes or NASA use it on the fuel tanks for the space shuttles. If you're trying to do big long wells in aluminium, it's a really good process for joining sheets together. It produces really strong wells.
00:26:33
Speaker
When we were looking at the machine, I said to the guy, could you stack up different types of metal in this and weld them together? And he's like, oh, yeah, we could try it. And luckily, this guy, Stephen, he was into knife making as a hobby. So he had this sort of pastime at making Damascus steel and things like that. He managed to get some time off his boss. And this was a machine that I think the charge was about 10,000 pounds a day to hire it for research purposes.
00:26:57
Speaker
so we managed to get a few hours of research time on this machine stack up different layers of metal and then friction stir welded together so that produced some lovely patterns in the metal kind of different from the traditional Japanese moku megane patterns it looked more like a stirred pattern like something you get when the barista makes your fancy coffee with the nice pattern on the top of it you get these sort of swirly patterns that you can make
00:27:21
Speaker
a little bit more liquid or fluid than something you get in a traditional mokume. And crucially you were joining and patching the metal at the same time, which sort of took out one of the steps that you do usually for these Japanese metalwork things. That turned into quite a big project for quite a few years. We were working with a really nice engineering company in Sheffield who were involved in the production of machines for this process. So it was great to work with engineers and people from different areas. The guys in this engineering
00:27:48
Speaker
firm had a really good way of thinking through problems in a very logical way. So working with the engineers and working with the material scientists and then bringing in the art and design stuff was really great sort of interdisciplinary collaboration. We collaborated with quite a few different kinds of companies like jewellery, luxury watch companies, luxury mobile phone companies, up to yacht companies and things like that where we were doing prototyping and development to work with for this material.
00:28:17
Speaker
that's really experimental, Colleen. And I bet these companies, you know, it would also give them something really exciting to look at, to be able to also demonstrate what their equipment can do by you trying all these new things. And so nice that you had Steve who was just happy to experiment because I think often when you go into industry, it can be quite daunting and they've got like set ways of doing things. You meet someone who is just happy to have a bit of a play or try something new that's just so gratuitous.
00:28:45
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah, we did some nice coins as well with the Sheffield Assay office, commemorate the women of steel from the Second World War, the women who worked in the steel industry there during the war. I think that was a key thing in working in research was to try and find somebody who would give you access to the equipment and processes to try and find somebody who had some enthusiasm for what you were proposing.
00:29:08
Speaker
because often we were working from the kind of art and design side of things. You were often working with lower no budget for the initial parts of the research and often the equipment you're trying to access is very expensive to use. I remember talking to somebody once in a coating place and they were working say with Rolls-Royce and Boeing and people like that to do coatings for jet engines. We were trying to persuade them to let us have a go in their equipment. If you can find somebody who's enthusiastic and sees the potential in that,
00:29:36
Speaker
Working with Stephen in the TWI in Sheffield was really good to find a partner like that. The guys at Rotary Engineering in Sheffield as well were really always enthusiastic. I had a really good way of thinking through problems as I said and the ability to produce the machines so if you can work with somebody who's helping you design and make the machines as well as make the materials that's really useful.
Teaching and Adapting During COVID
00:29:58
Speaker
Obviously you spent quite a long time in Sheffield and then you decided to go back to Ireland
00:30:04
Speaker
So in 2019, the job came up in Dublin and in NCAD in Dublin. I guess I was interested in moving back to Ireland. It seemed like a good opportunity to do it. And also Bregs, it was in the back of my mind. So Bregs is definitely making things more difficult from a research point of view for collaboration and funding and things like that. So that was a little bit of a push as well.
00:30:25
Speaker
So in I think it was November 2019 I started working in the art school in Dublin and then in March we got shut down because of Covid. I can remember the tea shop at the time I think he was in New York made an announcement saying that all the art education system was going to be shut down. Initially it looked like it was only going to be for a few weeks maybe two or three weeks and
00:30:48
Speaker
Of course that ended up being stretched out and yeah we had a couple of years of disruption where a lot of our teaching and work went online. We had students all around Ireland and we had some international students as well and they were working at home in all kinds of circumstances.
00:31:03
Speaker
So you had students, lucky students, who were maybe living on farms down the country where they had access to workshops and they could engage in all kinds of making. And then you had students in inner city flats in Dublin, where they were sharing a kitchen table with their other flatmates. It was impressive the creativity and the way people found to express themselves and to keep engaged in making. Although it was a tough time to get through, there was lots of innovation and digital learning came out of it.
00:31:30
Speaker
We got some great visiting lecturers online, so that was one thing that would never have happened, but for COVID, that we could get people to do presentations and lectures online from all around the world to our students. That's something that's carried on after COVID, which has been really beneficial. You're an educator yourself now. Do you think the way you were taught by Dorothy and Bill and Sue has inspired the way that you teach in any way?
00:31:58
Speaker
Definitely, we're just talking recently about the drawing projects that we're going to develop next year for the students. So that's something that definitely comes out of the time in Edinburgh. And I'm working with Angelo Kelly in NCAD in Dublin as well, who's also an Edinburgh graduate. So it's great. We both remember the drawing classes and the importance that was put on the portfolio.
00:32:17
Speaker
And that was seen as a design tool and also as a way of developing your ability to kind of see the world and as a quick form of making in that you could think through many ideas on paper more rapidly than you can in materials. So that drawing was kind of valued on many different levels.
00:32:35
Speaker
And then I'd say also the demand and the focus on kind of quality making as well. So there was always that in Edinburgh with Bill and Dorothy and Sue that, you know, you were definitely expected to make things well and to put a lot of effort into them. I think studying with Bill was really useful as a preparation for me to go to Japan in that the Japanese expectation for high levels of craftsmanship is extraordinarily high. So having worked with Bill previous to Japan,
00:33:00
Speaker
set me up with that sort of expectation and high bar. Hopefully that's something we can bring to our students now.
Exhibition Collaboration and Educational Resources
00:33:08
Speaker
So while I was working in Sheffield, I met with a curator Sarah Roberts at an exhibition down in London. And Sarah had curated the Chemistry Set exhibition in the early 90s.
00:33:20
Speaker
And I can remember as a student, Dorothy showing me the catalogue for the Chemistry Set exhibition and I was very interested in it because I was working with paternation and mixed metals at the time. Sarah's exhibition, the Chemistry Set Show, had looked at the impact of Michael Rose and Richard Hughes' book, The Colouring, Bronzing and Paternation of Metals. It's like the default book for people who are interested in paternation.
00:33:44
Speaker
While I was working in different workshops and visiting metal workshops around the world, I had always noticed that you'd see this book, Michael Rose book, in all kinds of workshops. I saw it in Japan, in China, in Korea, Philippines, Thailand, India, all over the place. Sometimes you'd see it in people's workshops where they didn't speak English.
00:34:04
Speaker
The key thing about this book was that it had these lovely color plates in the middle, really inspiring pictures of these beautiful patternations, which were linked to all the recipes. So Michael Rowe and Richard Hughes had dug out all these historical recipes and tested them and then taken nice pictures of the sample plates so that you could reproduce them in your own work.
00:34:23
Speaker
Sarah's exhibition looked at the impact of that book about 10 years after it was published. It looked at it across jewellery, metalwork and also looking at architecture and its use in advertising and things like that. So kind of a broad look but mainly focused on the UK. So Sarah was interested in doing an exhibition that would look
00:34:39
Speaker
again at that area, sort of what's happening 20 years later. And we decided that we would look at a broader, more international viewpoint to look at what's happening with Michael's book and the UK scene, but also look at what's going on in different countries. And then because of my interest in Japan, we brought some Japanese artists into the show as well. Because that exhibition happened during COVID, we did online interviews with the artists and they're published on the National Design and Craft Gallery website. So in the interviews,
00:35:08
Speaker
the makers are very generous and forthcoming in their information about the materials and processes and how and why they do what they do. It's a really useful resource for students I think or for people who are interested in the area. Sounds fascinating and such a useful resource. We'll include a link to that on the podcast project page on our website but just to finish there and say thanks so much Colleen for taking part in the podcast.