If it’s August, it must be Cork Craft Month. Now in its 16th year, the festival features 99 events, including 80 hands-on workshops, around the city and county.
Charlie Mahon is one of Cork’s best-known makers, and his work features in two of the festival’s major showcase exhibitions. Two of his distinctive ceramic sculptures may be seen in Echoes of the Makers, a special Cork Craft & Design members exhibition at Fota House in Carrigtwohill, while a third, along with some vases, is included in the Voice of the Craft exhibition at St Peter’s on North Main St, Cork. His shop at the English Market also features on the festival’s Clay Trail.
Mahon has been producing ceramics since his days at the Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1980s. “I was studying sculpture, and I ended up doing ceramics with Hugh Lorigan,” he says. “It was my minor subject, but I got really interested. For my degree show, I had three pieces in ceramic and a single wood carving.”
Ireland was then in the pit of a recession. “After college, there were no jobs – you could go to London or stay here on the dole – so I went back and did a post-grad, making wire sculptures and ceramics.”
When Mahon’s grandmother gifted him a sum of money, he began looking at opportunities for further study in America. “I applied for two courses, one in Mississippi and the other in North Carolina, and I was offered both. I took the one in Mississippi. I got a scholarship, so all my fees were paid, and they gave me a job as well, working on the front desk in the dormitories. The college was open 24/7, so basically I could work away in the pottery, learning the trade, whenever I chose. I did that for two years. It was a fantastic experience.”
He would have quite happily stayed on in America, but his parents were experiencing management problems with a fast food business they’d opened in Co Clare, and they asked if he would come back and run it. “I did that for a few months,” he says, “but I saw that it wasn’t going to work, so we shut it down.”
He stayed on in Co Clare. “I went around the potteries looking for work, and a place called Irish Country Pottery offered me a job as a production thrower. I threw 300 jugs for the banquet hall in Bunratty Castle before I was offered another job, in a rehabilitation unit. There were people from psychiatric institutions coming out into the community, and I worked with them on pottery production for the next six years.”
He met his wife, Elmarie, and they moved to Cork in 1996 when he was offered a position as production co-ordinator at the Stephen Pearce Pottery in Shanagarry. “A few years later, they bought Carrigaline Pottery, and I began working there as the technical manager.”
Mahon continued producing his own work as a sculptor. “I had three solo shows at Gallery 44 on MacCurtain St,” he says. “They all went really well. And then, around 2004, I set up in business myself, producing ceramic crafts. At that time, the outlets all had a sale-or-return policy, which meant you’d get paid when the work sold. But when the crash came in 2008, the market was quite literally wiped out. I had work in 27 different outlets. Most of them closed, and some never paid what I was owed. I found out that one guy gave my pieces to his landlord in lieu of rent. I got caught for thousands overall.”
He took a job with the Cheshire Home in Cork, and his ceramics took a back seat for the next several years. “It was Máiréad McCorley at Cork Craft & Design who got me making work again, around 2017. These days, I make between 100 and 200 pieces a week, but I still work at the Cheshire Home on a part-time basis. The crafts market is seasonal, you never know what might happen.”
Until recently, he worked from home in Little Island. “We have two old stables out the back, and a lean-to where I had the kilns. I’d go down in a raincoat half the time. The stables were never insulated, and the wind would blow through you. But then, about four years ago, I got a unit down in Euro Business Park. It’s three times the size, and a lot warmer.”
These days, Mahon’s wife Elmarie takes care of the business administration and running their craft shop at the English Market, allowing him to concentrate on production. His pottery lines include his Mackerel, Grá, Green Heart and Witty Sheep series. Successful and all as they have been, he hopes to shift to making more of his wall-hanging sculptures.
“I think of them as conversation pieces, the kind of work that tells a story,” he says. “The three galleries I sell them through are always crying out for more. I’d like to step up to producing at least two or three a month.”
Mahon is aware of how the art world often looks down on the crafts industry. “People like Grayson Parry have done an awful lot to bridge the two,” he says. “But that attitude is still there. A lot of it has to do with curators. Even in the crafts world, they’ll stick with showing their favourites. What we need is new curators, showing a greater variety of work, just like Ava Hayes has been doing with Cork Crafts Month.”
The crafts industry in Cork is in rude health, he says. Cork Craft & Design maintains two galleries, at Douglas Court Shopping Centre and St Patrick’s Woollen Mills, “and there are outlets all over the county. We have hundreds of craftspeople – potters, wood turners, furniture makers and so on – and Crafts Month is a great promotion for the work we’re doing.” He’s delighted to have so much work in this year’s exhibitions.
“The showcase at Fota House opened this past weekend, but the sculptures only came out of the kiln on Monday. In ceramics, you can expect to lose around 14% of the work from start to finish. That’s part of the game, you know. But when I opened the kiln, the two pieces were standing tall. That’s always a relief, I doubt I would have found the time to make anything else.”
