Little Homes from Clay and Porcelain

• Old stone dwellings throughout Ireland are being demolished and replaced by modern structures to a precise standard – regimented, ugly, servicing modern affluence and over-powering.
• History is evaporating in the name of progress and modernisation.
  It is forgotten that this progress and modernisation was born of humble beginnings.
• It breaks my heart to see the ‘Old Mother Ireland’ depicted as a romantic ‘Emerald Isle’ with red-headed colleens and the luck of the Irish. Tell a Claddagh pollock fisherman to set to sea after seeing a red-headed colleen or tell a Tyrone eel fisherman to set an eel line on Lough Neagh after being told ‘Good luck!’ – It won’t happen.
• Old thatched cottages were cold, damp, insect and vermin ridden. Families were large and the land was hard-worked to feed them all.
  Emigration from these homes to foreign lands was the only way to stem the flow of rank poverty. For poverty in these homes was reality.

Capturing the reality

• A simple photograph can give enough detail to realise a dwelling in three dimensional form.
• Ordnance survey maps will provide the foreground and background.
  Parish records will provide the lineage to give the dwelling a history right up to the modern day.
• It is pointless to produce a clay form without the human element. A house will only ever be a house unless it is a home.
• Each house created, to scale, will be accompanied by a bibliography of the home it was (or is) in booklet form.
• The people who lived, worked, played, rested and died here were real and created the generation we live in now.
• Little Homes of Ireland brings together all the elements within the Celtic Faith to produce an eternal image of history.