Colleen Connell: Where do you get your inspiration?
Ciarán O'Conboirne: Inspiration for the glaze colours comes from the immediate landscape of the Cooley Peninsula. Regarding the forms, inspiration has developed from an appreciation of symmetry and proportion stemming from the godfathers of Western art and architecture - the Greeks and Romans. Finally the inspiration for Celtic designs comes from old gravestones, artefacts, books, local legends, and lately my personal idiom on Celtic myths and legends.

Colleen: What goes into creating a glaze?
Ciarán: Essentially years of experience combining and experimenting with raw minerals to give the glaze its unique colour and its balance of opacity and transparency. Believe it or not, it takes anywhere from three months to a year to achieve the desired characteristics! Basically a good understanding of chemistry goes a long way.

Colleen: What aspect of your work gives you the greatest sense of pride?
Ciarán: Quite simply the technical challenge of taking an amorphous lump of clay and transforming it on the wheel to not just a functional but also a highly aesthetic object of art and craft.

Colleen: What does being Irish mean to you?
Ciarán: To me being Irish is possessing a sense of humour where everyone and anything can be laughed at, even in the most serious of circumstances. No matter how bad things get there is always a joke to be had. In essence it's a sense of 'spirit' that can never be dominated. This is why we, or at least our Saint's day, is celebrated the world over -- we are the good-time nation!

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