Pastoral crafts

TRADITIONAL CRAFTS:Grennan Mill Craft School turns 30 this year. It's a rural idyll where countless students have learned the arts of weaving, ceramics, printmaking and metalwork, writes GEMMA TIPTON

LOOK AT A piece of crafted fabric, and it can lead to the rather magical realisation that every single woven thread has been set by hand. Catherine Ryan knows how you can lose yourself in weaving. She teaches the skill at Grennan Mill in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year.

“When I’m working I get embedded. The students will say it too, the first quarter of the piece takes ages, then it gets rhythmic and comfortable, that’s when you lose yourself.”

If weaving is timeless, as well as traditional, there’s a similar sense of timelessness to the craft school itself. Set in a clearing, down a dark leafy lane on the banks of the River Nore, the old mill is a place apart. The sense of being somewhere out of time is reinforced on meeting the staff and students: those who do leave have a marked tendency to come back. Founder George Vaughan retired last year, but two of the first tutors, Peter Donovan and Niall Harper, are still passing on their skills to students.

Grennan Mill enjoys the reputation of being one of the best craft schools in the country, and the list of past pupils is illustrious, including silversmith Seamus Gill, artist Remco de Fouw, jeweller Angela O’Kelly and ceramicist Jane Jermyn. Ryan herself was a student at the school, before returning several years later to teach, and she agrees that “people find it hard to leave. Many students set up studios nearby on graduating, so there’s a special feel to the whole area.”

Ryan first studied at Cork’s Crawford College of Art. “I did a foundation course, so I tried everything. I took a liking to textiles, but I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with them, so, in 1985, I came here to find out.”

In the weaving rooms stand lines of looms, some part filled with strips of colour as mats and scarves emerge from the trellises of wool. “What I love is the texture,” says Ryan, who lives and breathes her craft. She has an infectious enthusiasm, coupled with a determination that her work, and that of the students, is the best it can be.

In such an old stone building, surrounded by looms and yarn, it’s easy to see how craft may be dismissed as old fashioned, maybe even irrelevant in today’s world of mass production and cheap consumer goods. So how do you get away from the woolly connotations of craft, particularly with textiles, so often seen as a “woman’s work” and devalued for that reason? Ryan disagrees.

“Look what happens when you get to the world of fashion: textiles are valued there, and the industry is full of men. John Rocha had this building before us. He still comes to us for fabrics sometimes.”

The fact that men do it too doesn’t entirely dismiss the inherent sexism in some conversations about textile craft, and Ryan adds that “at the school, we’re about standing up and being proud of craft”.

“I love that whole business of fine wool, linen, the three-dimensional elements, the colour. And making pieces you can touch and hold: hands on, hands in. You get to know the material so well,” she says, as we look around at all the potential in the rainbow spools of yarn lining the walls. “Then you can stretch the boundaries.”

Time and tradition are key to the ethos of the school, as Ryan explains, “we take people back to the traditional skills and techniques, but the thrill and the challenge is to see how, using these, the students can produce things that are new and innovative.”

Course director Alexandra Meldrum agrees. “We use new technologies, but also age-old ones. It’s about putting the two together to get something amazing.”

In the next room, tufted rugs are hanging on screens, and little strips of cardboard are wrapped with gradations of coloured thread. “We’re teaching the students to see what they’re looking at, training the eye to pick up colour,” says Ryan. “We get them to match the exact changes of shade on a cross section.”

On tables are ideas boards, where the students have mapped out their plans for a piece, and workbooks where inspiration is gathered.

She does agree that craftspeople don’t always work on their own image.

“Craftspeople care a lot about what their peers think, but they don’t necessarily take their measurement of themselves from people who don’t understand what they’re doing. Individual craftspeople can also tend to be shy. They don’t always promote themselves, but the quality is there.”

Teaching at the school frees her from trying to work on commercial basis. “It’s too hard to put hours and hours into something and expect people to pay for all that time.”

Outside, down a passageway, a door leads from semi-gloom to a gorgeous view of the rushing river.

“This is my favourite place. We have barbecues and parties in the summer. The students get really happy here. Like I did.”

It’s easy to see why people never want to leave.

See grennanmill.net for details