A New Life:When your hobby becomes an all-consuming addiction, it's time to change your life's priorities. Michelle McDonaghreports.
Although she had always been very interested in pottery and ceramics and felt very comfortable working with clay, it wasn't until Michelle Maher signed up for pottery classes in her local VEC that it ever occurred to her that she could actually "be a potter".
Having just given up her high- powered six-figure salary position as director of operations with a major supermarket chain, Maher decided to take up pottery classes as a hobby which very quickly became an all-consuming addiction.
"I was sitting in the class at the VEC, the teacher was chatting away and I said aloud 'Imagine working with clay, that would be brilliant.' A woman turned to me and said 'I'd say you'd love that.' I had never met her before and I hadn't even started the classes but she was right.
"At the end of that 10-week course, I was addicted and there was no stopping me."
Originally from Bansha, Co Tipperary, Maher graduated from NUI Maynooth with a masters in history in 1996 and went into retail management. With her family in the furniture business, she had retail in her blood.
In 2000 she became area manager for German supermarket chain Aldi which was just setting up in Ireland at the time. As area manager, she found herself travelling between Aldi's stores in Dublin, Cork and Galway and enjoyed the excitement of building up the new business.
She was very quickly promoted to store operations director, becoming the first woman in the UK and Ireland and one of a handful within the company worldwide to achieve this high-powered, six-figure salary position.
"I was sent to the UK in summer 2002 to get experience as operations director and ended up on the road for a year living in hotels all over the UK from Scotland to London. It was quite horrible. If I got a free weekend break in a hotel now, I'd say 'no thanks, I'll stay at home'," she laughs.
Before starting with Aldi, Maher had enrolled in a pottery course in Dublin but from the beginning, it was apparent that she would not have time for hobbies in her new job.
Although she would eventually have been moved back to Ireland when a vacancy for a director of operations arose here, she quickly realised she wasn't happy in her new role. It wasn't as exciting as being an area manager zooming around from store to store fighting fires but involved a lot of strategising for the future.
She was also quite homesick as her partner of 13 years was still living in Ireland.
"I left Aldi in 2003. I didn't know what I wanted to do, I just knew I did not want that life anymore. I knew something would happen for me, I just didn't know what it was going to be."
It was at this point that Maher enrolled in the pottery course at her local VEC in Dublin, the first of a year of numerous classes - 600 hours in all - in everything from pottery and ceramics to start-your-own-business and professional management. Having saved money while working with Aldi, she was in the fortunate position of not having to work for a while.
After a three-week full-time course at the National College of Art and Design, she made the decision to build her own studio at the back of her house in early 2004 and set up her company, Ceramic Forms.
"It was like going from the sublime to the ridiculous, it's so completely different from what I was doing before. I still shop in Aldi and when I tell my former colleagues there that I'm an artist, I might as well be telling them I'm an astronaut.
"To them, I'm this tough boss, a total professional in a suit. A lot of people think artists are flighty and run around in smocks which I'm certainly not."
In order to bring in an income initially, Maher decided to start teaching art classes in her studio. She started with one student and worried that it would never be a viable business, but is now running five evening classes a week as well as weekend workshops.
"I was very sure from the start about the kind of work I wanted to make, it's not very commercial or subtle and I use very dramatic colours.
"Teaching classes meant I had a regular income and could afford to stick to my guns and persist with the work I wanted to do after I was turned down by a number of shops."
Maher's persistence paid off when the chief executive of the Kilkenny chain of shops, Marian O'Gorman, saw her work at an exhibition at the RDS and placed an order with her.
She is currently taking part in the Kilkenny shops' Craft in Action initiative and can be seen working on her designs in the store from July 19th to 21st. Her work is also being sold in The Design Yard in Temple Bar, the Craft Granary in Cahir and Rossa Pottery in Cashel. Her larger sculpture pieces can be seen at the Botanic Gardens, Airfield House in Dundrum and featured in the recent Bloom festival.
"I used to work 60 or 70 hours a week sometime, 100 for Aldi, but as a ceramicist, I would never dream of counting my hours. I do work very long hours and have to make myself take time off. I could be doing the accounts one minute or working on my website and rolling out lumps of clay and glazing the next.
"It's very intense, but I love the variety of it," she says.