Looking at the world differently

A New Life: Former psychologist Linda Mulloy tells Theresa Judge about her career as a stained glass artist.

A New Life: Former psychologist Linda Mulloy tells Theresa Judge about her career as a stained glass artist.

Linda Mulloy remembers clearly the moment she decided it was time to give up working as a psychologist.

"As people phoned me up to make appointments, it just dawned on me that I was trying to find somewhere else to refer them to all the time."

After some 20 years as a psychologist, 18 of those with health boards, she is now well established as a stained glass artist with her second exhibition opening in Dublin in March.

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Based in Westport, Co Mayo, her work has been commissioned by hotels, pubs and other businesses and can be seen on many premises around the town.

Her studio is located in the garden of her home hidden away behind trees on the coast road out of Westport. There is no sound from the outside world to distract the attention and the room is filled with winter sunshine. Samples of work hang on the walls.

So what attracted her to working with glass? "Colours, I suppose, it's lovely how it's enlivened by light coming through," she says, pointing to a piece. "It's all sunshine on it."

She did her first course in stained glass when she was still working as a psychologist because it was "just another skill that I wanted".

Originally from England, she had always liked making things, and as a college student earned money by making clothes. "As soon as I started with glass, people began asking me to make bits, so it just blossomed."

She has never had to go looking for work. "I've always been amazed that work comes in, I don't advertise but I've work on now and I almost don't panic anymore. I used to panic - 'when I finish this piece, what'll happen' - and before you finish it, or the day after, someone else would come along and ask for another piece.

"If you're very lucky you might get a few days to do the things you wanted to do for yourself."

She likes to have "more or less a free hand at designing" but will take into account people's ideas or preferences for colours.

She also runs regular courses in stained glass from her workshop.

Contrasting her work as a health board psychologist with working on her own as an artist, she draws attention to the long hours she spends alone now, the lack of a fixed salary and a sense of fragility that goes with starting your own business.

"When you work for a government body you're not so conscious that you have to be productive at every moment - your pay would come into your bank account and it would almost be separate from what you did.

"There's a fragility in a situation when it is just you doing something - if you have a bad day in the health board, there's a routine that goes on. Not only do you get paid, but you meet someone at 11.30am for a cup of coffee, things roll on."

She's also interested in how being self-employed could affect self-esteem.

"When you've got a job, you have the status of a job. With this it's not structured - the only structure is the structure that I bring to it - so if that collapses then all the things about having a job and earning money, all that we tie up with self-worth and self-esteem [ collapses], it's much more fragile than being a cog in a big wheel."

She stresses that even though she has got to a stage where she does not have to worry about where the next commission will come from, there's a lot of hard work involved, from 9.30am to 6pm each day. "It takes a lot of input, lots of hands-on hours pass by."

Her first exhibition, done in collaboration with illustrator Pamela Gray, who also lives in Westport, sold out at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar three years ago. They have also worked together on a new exhibition, which was shown first at the Clew Bay Hotel in Westport, and will go on show at the Design Yard in Temple Bar in Dublin next month.

The newly refurbished Clew Bay Hotel also commissioned the two artists to do seven very large pieces, one 12ft long, for the windows of its bar. Abstract works, they are formed like an intricate collage with pieces of glass of different colours and textures held together by fusing or by copper foil.

The exhibition pieces are even more delicate, made up of tiny pieces of multi-coloured glass, some as small as a fingernail, layered and fused together in a kiln.

"Some look lovely, and then some just don't work - that's terribly depressing because you've put all you think that you've put into other pieces and there it is finished, and it's not any good."

On occasions like this she feels that the work is a lot harder than when she was a psychologist. But is there not more personal fulfilment to be gained from producing works of art?

"There probably is but it doesn't feel like it at the time. It's hard, it's a hard job, it's much easier to talk to someone who comes into the room about their problems than it is to try to force something out of your brain that you feel looks good."

She says she enjoyed meeting clients when she worked as a psychologist.

"It's a great privilege to be in that position when people come in and tell you what their problems are," she says. Much of her work, firstly in Sligo and later in Castlebar, was with children and teenagers.

When she left in the 1990s she felt that psychology was still not getting the recognition it deserved although she says this may have changed by now.

"I got a letter that I realised I could have received 10 years earlier, and I realised that despite having put a lot of effort into advancing psychology, nothing much had changed.

"People were used to psychiatrists but not psychologists and the fact that psychiatrists have a medical background leaves them up there with status but not necessarily up there with ability."

Having made one dramatic change of career she is open to the idea of changing again in the future. The possibility of producing a book is one option she has considered.

"My mind would always be open to change. I am still excited about what I am doing with glass but I frequently think 'what's next'."

Work from her most recent exhibition can be seen on Linda's website: www.blueglasshouse.com