Pat Connor's characterful sculptures spring from the chaos of his life in Schull, writes Alannah Hopkin
Pat Connor moved from Dublin to Schull in 1972, when you could buy an old farmhouse and a few acres on Mount Gabriel for around £1,000. When he split from his wife, Adèle, of Adèle's Restaurant and Bakery in Schull, they sold the family home, and Pat kept an acre and a half of the garden. This is a slice of mountainside, complete with gorse and brambles, with a distant view of Roaringwater Bay and Cape Clear. It is a gem of a site, with a rocky stream running through it, and on the highest point he has built a house and studio.
The garden is intermittently planted with clumps of crocosmia Lucifer and agapanthus, but there are more sculptures than flowers on view. They are known locally as Pat's perennial sculptures - small pieces of work, generally only a few feet tall: giant teapots, big-breasted torsos, a horse made from plates - witty, quirky stuff, sometimes sexy, sometimes grotesque, but always full of character and fun.
According to Francis Keane, who runs Ireland's only ceramics gallery, Keane on Ceramics, Pat Connor is Ireland's most important sculptural ceramicist of the past 30 years. "He should be selling in all the top galleries around the world, not just here," Keane says. Yet few people have heard of Connor's work.
That may be about to change. His paintings were included in a group show at the Warren Gallery in Mary Ann's Bar, Castletownshend, at the end of August. Later this month, he will share Keane on Ceramics's Christmas show with Christy Keeney. After that, he is hoping for shows in Dublin and the UK.
Pat Connor may be one of Ireland's most important sculptural ceramicists, but he is also possibly the most disorganised man in Ireland. He has spent the past four years living in chaos, due to building and moving.
He is great company, charming, lively, witty and irreverent, just like his work. But organised he is not. A projected 40-minute visit turned into a three-hour one. It took him about an hour to make a cup of coffee, between talking, finding and opening the coffee, talking some more, remembering to turn the gas on, looking for a match ... But the coffee, when it came, was a delicious espresso from a Gaggia machine, served with hot milk from a copper saucepan, and brown sugar in one of his own classic tableware bowls.
I wonder at the number of cookery books lying around, then remember he is the father of Simon Connor, who cooked so brilliantly for a few seasons at Adèle's, and now lives in Helsinki. His daughter, Joanna, is a stage designer.
But he does not live in surroundings of Conran-like perfection. This artist's house is not a show-piece, and is far from finished. "Everything is very temporary here. I had to move in very fast," he says, to explain away the unplastered walls of bare concrete blocks, with electric wiring exposed. "The past three or four years have been very interrupted, with all the building and moving. It should have been plastered this year, but I got too involved in working for shows. Can you imagine having to shift everything?" He looks around his cluttered kitchen with an air of despair.
Connor studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, but left in 1968, when Simon was born, as he needed to make a living. He worked for his tutor, Peter Brennan, throwing domestic ware, and in the studio of Fergus O'Farrell. In 1987 and 1988 Connor had shows of paintings and bronzes at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin. Then he went to New York for three-and-a-half years, and has not shown in Dublin since. This is partly because, by his own admission, he is hopeless at networking.
But he suspects that the problem also lies in his preference for making ceramics: "When there is a lot of money around, as there is at the moment, people tend to buy bronzes. They see that as real art, a good investment, and they can't break it."
The house may be unfinished, but the working areas would be the envy of most artists. He paints in a spacious first-floor room, while his pottery kilns and clay are in a separate, free-standing timber building with more windows than wall, and light pouring in from the transparent corrugated roof.
Here he makes his distinctive ceramic pieces, many of which are thrown, then manipulated, a technique also used by Picasso, though he did not do his own throwing. Connor describes his working method as "playing around", and it is the playfulness of his work that is so appealing. But his creations can also be deeply moving, such as the series of female amphoras he has designed to replace the treasures looted from Iraq's museums.
When I finally leave, he tells me to go into Schull to look at the work he has on show in Adèle's, which I do, but it is Monday, and he has of course forgotten that Adèle's is closed on a Monday.
Pat Connor's work can be seen at Keane on Ceramics, Pier Road, Kinsale, Co Cork (021-4774553), from November 26th until December 24th