LIVING: Alannah Hopkinmeets artists Rachel Parry and Cormac Boydell in their west Cork studio
RACHEL PARRY AND Cormac Boydell have lived near Allihies, on the tip of the Beara peninsula, between the grey rocky hills and the blue sea, since the late 1970s. Home is a small traditional farmhouse built in a deep glen, only a short walk from the seashore.
Boydell is one of Ireland’s leading makers of ceramics. His distinctive work, rough-hewn like the environment he lives in, brightly coloured with natural pigment and gold leaf, is much sought-after by collectors. Rachel, who trained as a painter at Goldsmiths, University of London, makes small pieces of sculpture assembled from natural materials largely sourced from the environment around her – fur and feather, turf, skeletal bones, wasps and (from a source in Dunmanway) snakeskin. Her first solo show opened yesterday at the Fenton Gallery in Cork.
The couple were among the first incomers to settle in Allihies at a time when the village was largely empty and the majority of their neighbours were elderly farmers. Their house, 45 minutes’ walk from the village, had no running water or electricity, and they had no phone or car. Now they have broadband, underfloor central heating, and a beautiful garden. The people living in the houses that Rachel can see from her studio are predominantly fellow artists, including Tim Goulding, and Charles Tyrrell.
Over the past 10 years or so, Allihies has been reinvented as a holiday village, with the majority of its brightly-coloured houses being second homes. As I drive through on a Sunday morning, a man in cargo shorts is planting ornamental grasses in the gravel garden in front of his newly-built terraced house. Suburbia-in-wilderness?
While the majority of houses are empty in the winter, the part-time residents have helped to keep the village going. There is now a decent supermarket and delicatessen. But there are few points of contact between the summer-home visitors and the full-time residents in the hinterland of the village.
The people whose names crop up in our conversation are Rachel and Cormac’s neighbours from the traditional community, who have supported them over the years in many practical ways.
Their house is wrapped around by a colourful cottage garden, cleverly designed to create different sitting areas. But it is raining, so we are talking in the open-plan sitting room. Light pours into the north-facing room from doors to the west and south, made entirely of glass. Our talk is punctuated by loud bursts of laughter, the perfect antidote to the serious topics – birth, death, spiritual life – that we touch on.
The L-shaped ground floor is spare and uncluttered, with exposed roof beams, wooden flooring, scumbled creamy-ochre walls and a large wood-burning stove. A few striking hand-made objects serve as focal points: a red broom, its “brush” made of crows’ feathers, unmistakeably Rachel’s work, hangs on the wall. The small dresser displays an eclectic collection of old and new ceramics, and a clay head of Rachel as a child, modelled by her artist mother. But the kitchen cupboards are plastered with baby pictures, of their granddaughter Alannah. “A grandchild! It’s awesome,” Rachel says. Their daughter, Molly, and her partner Greg, live in Dún Laoghaire, a six-and-a-half-hour drive away.
Rachel and Cormac met on a course for teachers of Transcendental Meditation (TM). She grew up in Cambridge, where her father was an academic; his father was the composer and musician, Brian Boydell. The Boydells discovered Allihies when Cormac was a child, spending holidays there in their caravan. He still remembers the impact of coming over the hill from Eyeries for the first time, and seeing the rocky hills of Allihies stretching out to the sea.
Cormac, who grew up in Howth, studied geology at Trinity College, and worked as a geologist in Australia, saving enough to buy a house. The idea was to live simply and self-sufficiently, and get back to nature. He lasted for about 18 months until the money ran out, then he took off for London, discovered TM, and met Rachel.
“When I first arrived here, I thought it was the most extraordinary place; it shocked me, it hit me in the solar plexus,” Rachel says. Her studio is perched on a rock above their garden, accessed by a narrow footpath. “My studio is very lovely in the summer, and it’s terrifying in the winter, because the whole thing rocks, and the windows bend.”
Rachel describes their early years in Allihies: “It was very much the idea of let’s bake bread and grow our own vegetables and make our own clothes and have a baby and be creative and have a spiritual life – most of which went out the door. There were so many ideals simmering away.” Rachel’s ideals included home-educating Molly, until she chose to go to school aged 11.
Cormac, who had studied ceramics at St Columba’s with Óisín Kelly, built a studio, and set about working full-time as an artist. But his income was so low that for many years he was on the dole, working two-and-a-half days a week as a labourer on the roads. The turning point came when he was placed on a back-to-work scheme, which freed him up to make and market his work.He is also now an instructor at Dzogchen Beara, a Buddhist Retreat Centre in Allihies. Rachel did not follow the Buddhist path, but has been involved for many years in the co-counselling community, which is perhaps why she is able to talk quite naturally, even cheerfully about her own death.
“I often wonder what my last thought will be as I am dying,” she writes in the book accompanying her new show. Her extraordinary pieces of art, delicate and intricately-made, communicate in an intuitive way her ideas about death, transgression, healing and transformation, both in her own life and as represented in mythology and folklore.
Rachel Parry’s exhibition at the Fenton Gallery, Wandesford Quay, Cork, runs until July 11th. See www.artireland.net
Photograph Veronica Nicholson