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Jerpoint Glass Studios - A singularly spiritual experience
Starting this week, Sean Keane embarks on a year-long "pilgrimage" to highlight Kilkenny's craft, artisan and food industry. Included will be potters, goldsmiths, icecream makers, whiskey distillers and many more. He starts at Jerpoint Glass Studios outside Stoneyford where the Leadbetters have been making hand blown pieces of glass to the highest quality for 30 years.
WATCHING a master craftsman at his trade in the heart of the Kilkenny countryside, helping to keep a family tradition intact is an enjoyable way to spend a few hours in early April.
And in an era where everything is mass produced and where the pace of life is far too fast, it is heartening to find the people at Jerpoint Glass Studios, Stoneyford creating glass of the purest quality with a reverence and respect missing in so much of what we do.
It's Thursday afternoon and the glass blower takes a gather of molten hot, red glass from the furnace and sits on his chair. Using centuries-old tools he centres, forms and blows the creation. Another artisan, using a bit iron forms the stem and foot. It is a magical experience and one which the Leadbetters would like as many people as possible to experience. It's free and there is no obligation on you to buy anything.
"If you experience it, then you will have a greater appreciation of what we are doing here," Sally Leadbetter says as we sip coffee in the enchanting Glass Attic Gallery above the factory shop.
She explains that hand-crafted pieces have a longevity, quality and craftsmanship not in mass produced pieces (she calls them disposables without even blinking). As she finishes, the words of the late Aldo Gucci from 1938 come to mind; quality is remembered long after price is forgotten.
Everything about Jerpoint Glass Studios is endearing. The love story that brought Kathleen O'Neill from Thomastown and Keith Leadbetter from Stoke-On-Trent, England to find an old farm house, dutch bar and cow shed beside an old estate run by the McCalmont family, Mount Juliet (found by furniture maker Clive Nunn who lives nearby).
It was a safe house during the troubles and many people will remember the late Nellie Hogan (always in her wellies) who lived there before Kathleen and Keith.
The love for what they do, the attention to detail and more importantly the ethos that people are important, that the glass blowers are the life blood of the enterprise and the sense that they are doing something different, singular and beautiful is everywhere.
Of course, the family is the cornerstone of the business and while Keith and Kathleen set up in 1979, their four children Sally, Rory, Eoghan and Roisin are now involved.
Sally credits her mother Kathleen with developing the ethos that makes Jerpoint glass so recognisable, drawing on simple, clear lines in the design and colour of the glass. It is hard to escape the romance of the colours and how beautifully they stand out in the glass and yet belong there. This will be the enduring legacy of the Leadbetters whose name is at odds with the fact that no lead whatsoever is used in their glass.
These are tough times for the craft industry. The traditional wholesale shops like the Design Centre, opposite Kilkenny Castle, the Kilkenny Shop on Dublin's Nassau Street and others are still placing good orders, but the Leadbetters are having to look elsewhere and in a few weeks they will have a new, updated website which will hopefully bring in more orders and attract more people to the studio and the Glass Attic Gallery over the shop and workshops.
While Jerpoint is art it is also a commercial enterprise, and with lot of people depending on it for wages, it is difficult to keep going. Sally's parents are on a trip to Cork to meet customers on the day I call. The need to drum up new business, keep loyal customers happy and extend their lines and their business is paramount if they are to keep going.
Yet you don't feel any of that when you are in the studio. There is a quietness, almost monastery like - that you are in a place of worship as is how it should be when you are in the presence of creativity.
Slowly it dawns on me, there is a spiritual side to the Jerpoint experience. It's almost a reverence and it is the Jerpoint colours that really reflect this presence.
Keith trained in Sweden and this experience, along with his own imagination helped to give Jerpoint its sense of identity. But it is the colours, the seascape especially, a mix of turquoise, which is the essence of Jerpoint and this is where Kathleen comes in as a painter, self-taught. The other colours used are berry, heather, honey and sky. That is not to take way from the naked simplicity and perfection of clear glass pieces.
It seems simplicity and perfection go hand in hand in a place of inspiration where a couple turned a dutch barn into a glass-making studio, a cow shed into a factory shop and a farm house into a wonderful home, providing Kilkenny and the South East with one of its most identifiable craft products. Not bad for 30 years of work.
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Weather for Kilkenny
Wednesday 08 February 2012
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Light rain
Temperature: 4 C to 6 C
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