A Day in Life - Liselott Olofsson, artist

Liselott Olofsson grew up in the heart of Kilkenny city. She attended school in the Presentation primary and secondary and went onto college in NCAD in Dublin where she studied art and ceramics.

After completing a HDip in primary school education, she spent 22 years as a primary school teacher, with the past 10 years in Kilkenny's Gaelscoil Osraí.

This year she decided to stop teaching and concentrate on her other passion, her studio in Kilkenny city called The Clayrooms. Although she will still be teaching, but in ceramics. Students, beginners and the experienced, can engage with clay by learning to throw on the potter's wheel or learn hand building techniques. 

Liselott has shown her work in Kilkenny, Cork, Dublin, and Vienna. She is currently on show at the National Design & Craft Gallery of Ireland with her Exhibition called Bearing Witness.   

Tomm Moore and Liselott Olofsson at the launch of her exhibition at the National Design & Craft Gallery in Kilkenny

Here is a glimpse into Liselott's world...

You’ve had an interesting career between teaching and ceramics.

I started in NCAD doing art teaching, but I left after three years of a four-year degree because I was too pressured as I also was a young mother.

So, I went on and did a ceramics degree in NCAD, which meant I stayed there for six years in total.  I was teaching for a couple of years here in Kilkenny as an art teacher in secondary schools and I also had my own practice.

Then I went off and retrained as a primary school teacher and gave up my own ceramics career for ten years. Until I couldn’t ignore ceramics anymore and opened the Clayrooms in January 2022.

Creating teapots at the Clayrooms

Niamh Sinnott, Aisling McElwain, and I set up the Clayrooms in the middle of a pandemic!  It’s a pottery teaching studio on Collier’s Lane in Kilkenny city. We are all ceramics artists and teach. So far, the feedback has been fantastic.

We are getting repeat business and people coming back for more courses. We do throwing and hand building courses as well as one off taste of throwing courses at the weekends. People can make their own cake stands, teapots, coffee cup filters and they made vases for Mother’s Day. Over Easter we have an adult and children throwing workshop and we're putting together our summer schedule soon.

We are trying to reach out and build a community who enjoy working with clay. We've had wheelchair users come in and use our special adaptive wheel for throwing clay.

Your work explores a lot of social and environmental themes.  How do you bring that to the Clayrooms?

My work explores social and environmental themes by allowing the viewer to interact and question their relationship to the ideas which underpin them. I aim to challenge existing beliefs, to promote reflection and deepen levels of engagement with the themes. 

In the Clayrooms, we have created a very social space due to the process with clay i.e. you don't make something within an hour. So, there’s an engagement for at least three hours if you come on our courses.

It's about having that space where people can come and have a chat and feel really part of the community, that’s what we are trying to develop, so the social aspect is really important.

Another reason why I set up the Clayrooms - I was working alone in my home studio, which I built 14 years ago. I realized that I'm a social person, because I enjoy teaching, I enjoy being with groups and I enjoy the dynamics of groups and that's why I think I really enjoy the Clayrooms, and its social aspect.

I enjoyed being in college, meeting different artists and different disciplines in college and talking about our opinions, ideas and processes and materials and all that. Being in my home studio on my own was a bit sad for me, I never really enjoyed it, and I was always trying to find a space where I could meet other people.

The Clayrooms are a win for both teacher and students.

Time to get creative at the Clayrooms

What’s the backstory behind your current exhibition ‘Bearing Witness’ at the National Craft Gallery?

A lot of the times that I was working on my own in my studio, I was listening to the radio at the time. It was back in 2018, and there were a lot of reports about violence against women and domestic violence.

At the time, I was doing a lot of meditations and there was a practice called bearing witness meditation. Niamh Barrett runs this kind of bearing witness meditation practice, and I joined one of her practices in Dublin. It was a beneficiary to the Women's Aid Report.

Margaret Martin, the Director of the Women’s Aid Agency came to the meditation and at the end just spoke to us about Women's Aid and the work that they do. Afterwards we went up to the mountains to do walking meditation to remember all the women who had been found dead in the mountains and those who had disappeared.

That practice of bearing witness was really powerful for me, and I wanted somehow to be able to make some work in reflection to that experience and the crisis that was happening in Ireland at the time, the increase of domestic violence during the pandemic and that is still happening.

So, the 232 cups represent all the women that were killed.

Yes, they do. Each individual cup is casted in porcelain with a different handle, which is a visceral representation of the number of women who were violently murdered.

I asked Margaret Martin if I could use their 2017 Women’s Aid Report. I took statistics from the report and looked at the number of women that were recorded since Women's Aid was established in 1997.

From 1997 to 2017, 232 women were murdered, and I wanted to represent each person in a sense, but not personally. I wanted to make a piece of work that anybody could view, and it wouldn't be upsetting.

Like, I didn't want to create a piece that was violent. I thought about what a domestic situation looks like, I think that’s when you share a cup of tea and the Women's Aid is about listening to people and sharing stories. I can imagine people having cups of tea and talking about their stories. So, it's trying to find a way to express a social element to my work in a way that was non-violent and was accessible. 

Your Bearing Witness exhibition has really touched the family members of the women who were in domestic violent situations.  

Yes, when my work was on display in Kilkenny’s Watergate, I had lots of family members come to me. Mothers whose daughters had been murdered.

At the time, I didn't really understand the impact of the exhibition and you can’t help but absorb the impact of their stories. It was great to give people space to tell their story about their daughters.

They had heard about the exhibition, came to see and in turn I sat and listened to them for three or four hours every day. For me I wanted to create that safe space where they could talk and a listening space. I wanted to bear witness to their personal stories.

Your partner is Tomm Moore of the award-winning animation company Cartoon Saloon. You have some exciting news about a new film that you will be making with him.

Yes, we have worked 30 years on creating a life together so now we have decided to collaborate on a short film called ‘A tiger in Paris’.

It’s based on a true story about a tiger escaping from a circus in Paris in 2017. It’s also about how people’s imaginations were sparked and reported that there were sightings of the tiger all over Paris, when in fact she was just on the loose in a small part of Paris for just two hours.

It looks a little bit on colonialism as it is set in Paris. There’s also going to be a nod towards animal welfare, animal rights and speciesism because that’s a passion of ours as vegans for over 20 years.

It's exciting as we are going to be stepping into each other’s worlds. Both our passions will be moulded together in this film, there is going to be a little bit of ceramics and clay animation in the film too.   

You have been to the Oscars three times with Tomm for Cartoon Saloons fantastic nominations. What have they been like?

There’s a great sense of community with the Irish in LA. All the Irish people in LA come together to celebrate the nominations. The nomination is the celebration, it’s not the awards, which is lovely. Especially this year when there was a great showing of the Irish.

It is also stressful, getting your hair and makeup done! I’ve been lucky to wear some beautiful pieces of jewellery from Kilkenny’s Rudolf Heltzel and gowns designed by Irish designers Jennifer Rothwell and Joan Brennan.

We've been very lucky, people have been so generous and so kind and supportive, especially to Cartoon Saloon.

Bearing Witness exhibition runs until May 2023 at the National Design & Craft Gallery of Ireland. Adult & child throwing taster class over the Easter holidays www.clayroomskilkenny.ie