Laura O'Hagan's Architectural Ceramics company is located in Bray, which happens to be the town in which she grew up and where she went to school. Coming full circle in the town is just fine, she says. "A good thing. The place is familiar, there are people to connect with. It's great."

There's an exuberance in O'Hagan's work which belies any cosiness with the situation. Work in progress energises the vast, bright studio space - which is hell to heat in winter but airy and invigorating at this time of year.

A semi-circular 25 metres of floor is covered with the swirling multicolours of a work made of hand-painted, hand-cut mosaic tiles. It's waiting to be transported to Belfast for installation in a two-storey conservatory, as soon as the marching season ends.

Laid out close by, there's what O'Hagan, with wry humour, calls "semi-romantic fantasies" set upon a "mobile" wall, which is a personal, non-commissioned project. With lots of yellows, oranges and what could be dark blue reeds sitting in water, this piece will feature soft lighting underneath and move on castors.

"It could be used to create different atmospheres or spaces in, say, restaurants," O'Hagan explains,, "or even offices. I hope to make six, have an exhibition." Her Bray studio-workshop has been up and running for 10 months now. Going well too. She employs a full-time main art assistant - but Emma Barone is more than just that, O'Hagan says: "she's my right-hand woman".

Others work for her on a freelance or part-time basis, while the studio works for itself. "It's wonderful; 7.5 metres high and with 12 metres by 10 metres of floor space." The work is expanding in size because of it.

"We're about to get a glass door to let in even more light," O'Hagan says. A thought strikes her, and laughter along with it. "It's great too when the pigs arrive at the abattoir next door. The smell . . ." Having the abattoir for a neighbour is, like everything else, all in a day's work. "There's nobody we won't work for," says O'Hagan. "We do commissions for churches, pubs, public areas, cinemas, theatres, personal areas - small and large."

Work portfolios bear this out. One of O'Hagan's biggest pieces, 155 sq m of wall in hand-painted tiles, will be installed at the end of July in a private house in Castleknock, Co Dublin. It will extend from the swimming-pool to the garden and, working with the water level, give the effect of continuing endlessly.

O'Hagan demonstrates, with coloured sketches, how the work developed. "From inside the house, you get a sense of movement, of bands of colour moving across the wall. It will have great effect on their living space."

To get the tiles right, she and Emma spent time in a factory in Germany, hand-painting the tiles individually and firing them in a kiln. She pays tribute to Richardson's tiles, who "were very helpful in getting us into the factory and getting the tiles home" and to Tilestyle and Oxley Keortland, "who are both very obliging whenever we need special tiles".

Elsewhere, the portfolio shows the work that went into creating 220 sq m of floor for a New York apartment, into tiling the impressively Victorian-style Orangerie bar in the Radisson Hotel, Stillorgan, and making the humorous walls of Morton's delicatessen in Ranelagh.

Other achievements include the moving, complex imagery for the wall and floor around the Baptismal font in Dundrum church, the "Flirting With Venus" and other walls for the Imperial Bar on Main Street, Cavan, memorable Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando images for the floor of the D·n Laoghaire cinema complex and the newly erected clay-stone sign for Temple Bar's Green House.

The journey to complete this circle has been eventful, professionally speaking. In the beginning, when O'Hagan finished school in Bray, she didn't get the place in college studying architecture which she wanted. "So I worked with Gerard Crowley as an architectural model-maker for five years. It was great fun and I loved it. I was all set to take off to travel the world when I literally threw in an application for art college and got three acceptances.

"I went to the NCAD and got a diploma in Craft Design and went on to work as a freelance designer. I went to Spain, learned Spanish and worked in ceramics with Diois Vacas and Cristel Cabrelles. A great experience, hugely dramatic and wonderful. There were 10 Irish people there and a hell of a lot happened in those three months. "I came home and went to Kilworth Craft Workshops in Cork and then set up Tileworks with Orla Kaminska off the South Circular Road, in Dublin." That award-winning partnership lasted eight years and made a name for both of them. (O'Hagan won Young Businesswoman of the Year Award for the company.) Tileworks turned out notable works for Government Buildings, D·n Laoghaire Harbour, the reception desk in the Coach House at Dublin Castle and work for private houses, bars, cafΘs and theatres.

When the time came to move on, Kaminska remained in the SCR workshop while O'Hagan took herself for three years to the Fire Station Artists' Studios in Buckingham Street. "I eventually found a studio in Dundrum in the grounds of a private house. It was a wonderful space and I spent two years there, but in the end the Celtic Tiger won out and they decided to build 11 townhouses in the grounds.

"It took me six months to find these premises and, though it costs a lot more than I wanted to pay, I'd been out of work for six months so having a place was the lesser of two evils."

Along the way she married Per Ploug, the Danish kitchen designer at Danish Design, Blackrock, Co Dublin. Their little boy is three and a half years old.

For now and the foreseeable future there are, O'Hagan says, "two ways I want to work. I want to work on commissions because I enjoy them, really like people and have to pay the rent. I'd also like, at some stage, to take a year out and work on an exhibition. I've never had an exhibition on my own and when I do I'd like it to be really good.

"I like working on walls; the mobile wall is an expression of that. Architecture in general attracts me. I like it and the people involved. I'm also working towards taking a whole day a week for myself and my own work."

As her artistic statement puts it: "My work is an obsession with primal forces generated by life, dreams and their consequences."

Laura O'Hagan Architectural Ceramics is at Coolard Studios, 2, Riverside, Seapoint Road, Bray, Co Wicklow. Tel. (01) 286 8682. Website: www.laura-ohagan.com.