Susan Cuffe's sculptures have a life of their own and fairly dance off the walls. Don't miss her solo show, writes Patsey Murphy
It would be fair to describe the small parish of Carrickgollogan, near Shankill in Co Dublin, as something of an art colony, having attracted an impressive number of painters, sculptors and craftspeople over the years. The old lead mines are on the top of the hill, so one has to assume that the water had nothing to do with all this creativity.
The painter Norah McGuinness, who started the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943, was an early settler. Anne Yeats was a regular visitor. Janet Mullarney's provocative wooden sculptures had their beginnings here, as did Barbara Mullarney's textile art and the ornithologist Killian Mullarney's fastidious drawings of birds. There's the Mexican-Irish Rubalcava family, whose daughter Rebecca has just made a rug for the king of Jordan and whose mother made the tapestries that hang in the Unesco headquarters in Paris. The weaver Terry Dunne hails from these parts, as did a number of architects and teachers specialising in art and design.
The Cuffe sisters are another talented trio from Carrickgollogan (not forgetting Ciarán Cuffe TD). Gráinne and Siobhán Cuffe are noted printmakers, and Susan Cuffe, for many years a librarian at Dublin City University, is a sculptor who works in copper wire and glass. She abandoned her long daily commute between Bray and DCU only recently - "It got to the point where I had to leave the house at 5.50am" - and is now working in Enniskerry, in a studio where the weaver Alice Roden used to live. "I don't know myself. I have time to walk in the forest every morning," Cuffe says. This has also given her time to put together a solo show of 32 pieces that will open in Dalkey next Thursday.
Susan Cuffe's work is immediately accessible: colourful, whimsical, fluid. "I love Japanese art - their sensibility and sense of line. One of my favourite places is the Chester Beatty Library, for its collection of oriental drawings. My tools and my materials are very simple. All I need is wire and pliers. And I love using colour."
She uses luminous glass beads from all over the world: southern China, Addis Ababa, Murano, Mexico. Once made, every piece is sandblasted, then sprayed with acid over a number of days, which gives it a verdigris patina. They can be hung indoors or out; against a wall or like a mobile. The dresses can seem quite ethereal; the fish swim around like moving line drawings.
Wire sculpture has the advantage of being more affordable, as well as more colourful, than work cast in bronze or carved from wood. Here the collection ranges from a pair of five-centimetre shoes up to a three-metre-long jellyfish dangling from the ceiling like mad Miss Haversham's chandelier. Sure to bring on a smile.
Sculptures from the Moon Garden by Susan Cuffe runs from Thursday until Sunday, May 6th at Dalkey Castle, Co Dublin. See www.cuffesculptures.com or call 01-2820490