The fine art and hard graft in Northern Irish crafts

Northern Ireland is having a month-long celebration of its contemporary crafts. Alanna Gallaghertries her hand at the wheel of a pottery workshop

SAY POTTERY wheel to someone and they're more likely to recall the steamy scenes between Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in the 1990 film Ghost than talk about techniques used to create crockery and sculpture. This isn't news to ceramic artist John McKeag who has heard it at least a thousand times before, he says.

We're in his Co Antrim studio for a workshop on Raku ceramics as part of Craft Month in Northern Ireland, which is taking place through August, with the focus on ceramics. The region already has strong historical ties to pottery and ceramics. Craft Month celebrates this with Our Objects, an exhibition that pairs local historical pieces by the pottery powerhouses of Beleek and Wade with pieces by international leading lights, including British ceramicists Richard Slee and Alison Britton, Hans Stofer from Switzerland and Danish-born Anders Ruhwald.

McKeag's workshop is set in the historic Pogue's Entry, situated just off Antrim town's Church Street. It is a refurbished traditional whitewashed house that dates back to the 18th century.

In the creative world's pecking order, craft has always played second fiddle to the more lucrative discipline of fine art. This second billing is changing, thanks in part to craft's re-branding as an applied art, says John McKeag. "Then there's its affordability. Compared to the prices for pieces at international art fairs, craft work by leaders in their fields is comparatively cheap," he says.

There are also pottery classes and workshops, and lessons in other crafts, such as lace-making. For now, though, my challenge is to make a Raku pot in an afternoon. Raku is a rapid-firing technique that originated in Japan and uses theatrical alchemy to fuse smoke into clay fault lines created by the kiln heat.

After several lame attempts at throwing a pot on the wheel, glazing an already-fired pot feels fast, fun and easy. But it's a case of trial and error as you don't really know what you're doing in terms of decoration until you see the glazes fired and oxidised.

Once the pot has been decorated, it is fired in a kiln at a heat of 900 degrees for about an hour. Each scalding hot pot is then removed using tongs and held in the air, cool by comparison, and you get to hear the glaze crackling under the thermal shock pressure. This creates glaze faults that are accentuated when the pot is then plunged into a zinc dustbin that has been lined with shredded paper.

The paper combusts on contact and the smoke blackens the clay and further accentuates the glaze faults. This is low-tech pyrotechnics and the highlight of the day. It is thrilling to see and smell the part smoke plays in the process. Because of the combustion element this course isn't suitable for under-18s but that doesn't stop Ellen McKeag, the potter's 11-year-old daughter, and her friend Charlotte Beatty, age 10, making models of mermaids, jellyfish, spiders and sharks from the same clay. This is something any household can do at home with air-drying clays available at all art and hobby shops.

"Thirty years ago, when I started studying pottery, it wasn't seen as being at all glamorous," says McKeag. "Craft is now desirable and pottery has left its beads and sandals fusty image behind.

"Fine artists like Swedish Eva Hild use clay to create big sculptural forms, and Englishman Ken Eastman has an ongoing collaboration with Royal Crown Derby porcelain. Both show the latitude that craft now has."