A New Life: A ceramics course leads to a new way of life for a former technical support engineer. Lorna Siggins reports
Losing one's job may seem like the end of the world, but for Anne-Marie Fives it will always represent a new beginning. If the Dublin company she worked for hadn't been forced to close, she might never have taken the route that recently led her to Galway's Fisheries Tower on the Corrib.
Fives (33), who is from Galway city, studied electronic engineering at her home university, and signed up for three months' voluntary work in Africa before taking a master's degree in environmental management. On securing the post-graduate qualification, she was employed by an environmental consultancy in Dublin.
"It was very interesting and stimulating, preparing environmental impact statements mainly, and I enjoyed it a lot," she says. However, the company folded up and she returned home, where she secured a job as a technical support engineer with one of the multinationals, APC in Ballybrit.
For 'technical support', read 'answering phones to troubled customers'. "I was troubleshooting down the phone, trying to help people with particular problems. It could be very stressful, but at the same time the atmosphere in the company was brilliant.
"All during that first year there, though, I felt I was going to have to change. I realised that I had no natural interest in engineering or electronics, and I didn't like being office-bound. The fact that the colleagues were so lovely made the choice more clear. I knew this type of work just wasn't for me and that I would have to make the move."
She had already made something of a 180 degree turn when she was at university, which may have prepared her for new directions. "I had been good at camogie in school in Salerno, and I spent my first year of college playing for Salthill to the exclusion of almost everything else. The training was very intensive, it was full time, and so I knew I had to stop completely." She enlisted on a ceramics night class in her second year at university.
"I just loved it," she says simply. "It was my first time working in clay. I think we might have had one day of it at school - and it must have made an impression. I found I could express myself." So she gave her notice to APC and decided to try to pursue a career as an artist, with the unwavering support of her parents.
The State-sponsored back-to-work enterprise scheme proved to be invaluable. "I did a book-keeping course, learned other skills, and it was a great way of easing oneself into a new career where one couldn't be guaranteed any immediate income." She travelled a bit more - to Italy for a year and to London for six months with her partner, writer Julian Gough. And she set up her own studio in Galway city.
Her first solo exhibition as part of the Galway Arts Festival in 2000 focused on large ceramic eggs, and her second, in 2002, involved shells, fossils and hybrid creatures. In what she describes as an "evolutionary progression", her third exhibition revolved around bronze, aluminium and ceramic foetuses, "Invisible Friends", as in the title. It was staged in the Fisheries Tower, run by Galway Civic Trust, as part of this year's Tulca Season of Visual Arts.
"It couldn't have been a better venue in a way, because it is a small, intimate space surrounded by water!" she says. It is also very accessible. "People have been able to walk in off the bridge - people who might feel too intimidated to walk into an art gallery. So, I've had school kids coming in because their classmates recommended it!
"I was really surprised and pleased by that - teenage boys shyly appearing at the door and asking where the 'armoured baby' was because their friend had told them to check it out. That's brilliant!"
She received a range of responses to her armoured foetuses and runaway brides, and one gallery told her that it couldn't show these particular sculptures as they would be "too shocking" for clients. "In Ireland, you see a foetus and you think immediately of death, but it doesn't have to be like that. The whole idea of a sculpture being 'about' some issue is a complete misunderstanding."
Fives is eight months' pregnant and will be preoccupied with another new life after January, but her aim now is to explore fresh outlets for her work. "I realise that I won't be able to depend on Galway, and that one has to exhibit elsewhere." She also firmly believes anyone could take the step that she has taken, and that one doesn't have to have had formal art training.
"I actually feel very strongly that art school can be very bad for artists," she says. "In a way, art can't really be taught. Techniques and skills can be taught - but not how to be an artist. Nowadays, art schools don't even teach much in the way of skills anymore. They just fill your head with art theory.
"You're much better off, as an artist, to just get on with it yourself. Go see the best art in the museums and galleries around the world. That's where you'll get the really useful education. I spent my six months in London going to the National Gallery and the British Museum and other galleries. And then, having seen the best art in the world, the next thing is to forget it all and look into yourself and do your own thing."
Anne-Marie Fives has her own exhibition website at www.annemariefives.com