Cork-based artist Maud Cotter wanted a combined living space and work studio. The exciting and innovative space that she finally got fits perfectly with the city's artisanal past, writes Gemma Tipton
The magic of cities often lies away from their public facades, away from the bright shop fronts, the grand civic buildings, the theatres, galleries, showpiece hotels, churches and cathedrals. The real magic of cities can be found in the places where people actually live; not in purpose-built towers of identical apartments, but in the little streets and lanes, thick with history and layered with legends and tales. Walking past walls and windows, the magic comes from imagining the lives lived inside.
Shandon in Cork is visible from a distance because of the Shandon Bells, the famous clock tower of St Anne's Church that sits on a hill above the River Lee. It is known locally as "the four-faced liar", because for hundreds of years it showed different times on its different faces. It was repaired in 1986, in one of those well-intentioned gestures that destroys the idiosyncrasies of history, although it does mean those in the area can now accurately say what time it is. Hidden beneath the bells, however, is a maze of steep streets and lanes, where a different sense of the city emerges.
Shandon was an artisan area, where people lived and worked. Warehouses and stables lay alongside cottages, nudging up against little shops, the almshouses, the churches, and the Cork Butter Exchange, which in the 19th century traded millions of pounds of Munster butter, shipping it to far-flung places such as the West Indies and even to Australia. For artist Maud Cotter, Shandon is now both home and her place of work.
With her husband Peter Foynes, Cotter had been searching for a building to convert into a home and a studio, and had seen many of the warehouses where she had worked being bought up by developers. Looking in the Shandon area, however, where Foynes (an archivist who runs the Butter Museum) works, she found that again and again the couple were bidding against both the City Council and developers, who were buying derelict spaces to convert to apartments. Frustrated at the process of bidding and losing, Cotter approached the council with her ideas and found a receptive ear with city manager Joe Gavin.
"There are lots of things that can help energise a city centre," says Cotter. "There's live practice, people doing and making things. A strong policy line needs to be maintained on this, or the cultural heart of cities will be lost." Joe Gavin agreed and enabled the couple to buy a derelict cottage with a disused barn behind it from the council. They knitted the two spaces together, with the help of architect Andrew Lane. The result is a unique project that is half house, half studio, and that restores a part of Shandon in keeping with its tradition as an artisan area. From the outside there are few clues to how exciting and innovative the space is within. There is the old exterior wall, now listed, the traditional sash windows, the carriage entrance beside the front door, that would once have brought a horse and cart through to the warehouse space behind. But a keen eye can spot the details: a glazed line above the single height wall at the rear; a hint of the zinc that roofs the studio space; rain catchers hanging from the guttering, transforming falling water into delicate showers.
Inside, the house is something else entirely. The question was, says Cotter: "How do you dovetail a studio and a house, the domestic and a working space?" Having worked with Andrew Lane before, on a project for Cork 2005 to design market stalls for Coal Quay, the choice of architect was an easy one. The result of their collaboration is, as Lane describes it, "a Pandora's box of a building. It's full of surprises. There's an almost medieval feeling to the domestic part, like a tower house, and it's very suitable for Shandon in that it's grainy, dense and urban and yet there are surprising open spaces, like the courtyard area."
What Lane did was to create a "middle section", linking the front and rear parts of the building. This contains the staircase and brings light into the house. Going up through the three storeys of the house, different views of the city begin to emerge. "The reason for that," says Lane, "is that we've put glass at the junctions between the structures. Wherever you have a solid, you also have glass, so there's an interplay." The views are something Cotter appreciates. "You feel high up here. Imagine - we're surrounded by buildings, but we have all this sky. It alters my perception of scale."
The use of glass also links the two different parts of the house, the home and the studio. Sitting in the light-filled kitchen (on the second floor), the view from French windows leads across a patio to the studio below. At night, lights from the windows reflect unexpected views back across.
How did Lane take account of Cotter's art in designing the house and studio? "I already knew Maud very well, and as we'd worked together before, it was impossible to design the spaces without subconsciously thinking about her work. Also Maud's work and her personality are so intertwined. But Maud has finished the building herself - she did the interior fit - so she's actually responded to the spaces we've given her. She's tied them together."
From skirting details, to floors and finishes, to little visual treats such as the silk flowers "growing" from the base of a kitchen chair, there is a sense of Cotter's fascinating art at play in the house, growing beyond the studio. Josephine Kelliher, director of the Rubicon Gallery, where Cotter exhibits (and where she will have an exhibition in early 2007), comments on how Cotter "experiences our common, and often mundane reality, quite uniquely - as much more animated and multi-dimensional."
So has the new studio affected Cotter's work at all? "The new work is on both a large scale, as well as on a neurotic smaller scale. It's domestic in reference. I fired my recent piece, Not the Full Story, in the oven in my kitchen." Cotter describes Not the Full Story as having "the reproductive system of the spider plant," as good a way as any of getting to grips with a piece that includes shelves of tea cups and plates, with mad things growing from them, threatening to take over the wall. "I like Martha Rosler, the American artist," says Cotter. "I like her idea of charging the domestic space with things that may be considered alien to it. 'Home', to me, is a place in which one adapts to meet the future, a place from which we address the world as it changes, not a place to hide."
Maud Cotter's studio is open annually as part of Art Trail, www.arttrail.ie. More information about her work from the Rubicon Gallery on www.rubicongallery.ie