N S F

14:00 – 16:00
Live Practice with Simon Kidd – Come and experience Simon producing silicone moulds with plaster shells, capturing textural elements and found objects on the Factory Floor. Simon will be choosing and preparing given areas, mixing and application of silicone and thickeners, and then the making of a plaster shell. All done in-situ.
 
18:00
Official Launch of the Festival, followed by Clare Twomey in-conversation with Linda Sormin.

9:30
Saturday Introduction with curators Clare Twomey, Nuala O’Donovan & Dobz O’Brien
 
9:45 – 11:30
Artists’ presentations on their individual Practices with William Cobbing, Florence Peake, Simon Kidd and Bernadette Tuitte
 
12:00pm – 13:30pm
Live Practice with Simon Kidd – Removing the silicone moulds and preparing them for translating them into clay objects through press moulding.
 
14:30 – 16:00
Clare Twomey in-conversation with William Cobbing. This will be a performative conversation with William Cobbing followed by a round table discussion with the audience.
 
16:00pm – 18:00
Live Practice with Bernadette Tuite – Raku Firing the end results of the live bench

9:30
Sunday Introduction with curators Clare Twomey, Nuala O’Donovan & Dobz O’Brien
 
10:00 – 13:00
Live Practice with Simon Kidd – The making of the clay artefacts from the silicone moulds through press moulding, including the incorporation of local materials gathered from the NSF.
 
Live Practice with Nuala O’Donovan
 
Live Practice with Bernadette Tuite – Raku Firing the end results of the live bench
 
14.00 – 15:00
Live Performance with Florence Peake
 
16:00 – 17:00pm
Festival reflections on the Factory Floor – Discussion with Clare Twomey, Florence Peake & William Cobbing.

Clare Twomey is a British artist, researcher, and curator (b 1968) Twomey is among the most ground breaking and influential material specific artists of her generation. Clare Twomey is a defining figure of the expanded field of ceramics. Her practice encompasses monumental site-specific installation and performance, she frequently collaborates with institutions, and embraces temporality and the audience as collaborator. Twomey uses these strategies to explore themes of social responsibility, where the audience are encouraged to make conscious decisions that determine their engagement with the work.
 
Twomey’s purview explores aspects of material, skill and values in making, choreographing process as performance. Twomey is a research led artist actively engaged in challenging and bringing attention to obscured narratives. Through her curation at the National Sculpture Factory CLAY holding/transforming/performing Twomey’s key tenent creates opportunities to be witness to experts in moments of live practice, with artists who are demanding contemporary languages from this ancient material. Twomey addresses clay as a site of both production and negotiation, complexity and the breadth of clay practices being foregrounded at the National Sculpture Factory. The live practice artists are the focus for this curation alongside the artists in conversation lectures to develop ways to challenge fixed modes of clay practices by reimagining production with the demands of this ancient and enduring material.
 
claretwomey.com

Nuala O’Donovan builds sculptural forms in porcelain clay based on the patterns and geometry of living organisms.
The works are comprised of a multitude of individual handmade elements and are constructed slowly over a period of weeks or months. The story of the making and progression of the work is recorded as a form of narrative in its patterns. The changes are incremental, small variations containing a history of beginning and suggestions of future possibility.
“I’m interested in the narratives suggested by imperfections and scars. The irregularity is a record of an event in the life or making of a piece”. Each piece is unique – a result of the use of the characteristics of fractal geometry as a reference in the building of the work.
The works are made in series, all based on an individual element from a pattern observed in a living form in nature. Natural forms are not static but are constantly in transition – in the making of O’Donovan’s work also, each work is a progression of the form that preceded it.
 
Nuala O’Donovan is based in Cork City, Ireland. In 1994 she completed a BA(Hons) in metal and glass at Middlesex University in the U.K. and an MFA by research in the Ceramics Department at MTU, Ireland in 2008. Since then, O’Donovan has been the recipient of a number of national awards including the Irish Arts Review Emerging Artist Award 2008, The Golden Fleece Award 2019, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris Artist Residency 2020. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. She is currently engaged in research into new work at the Dean Artists’ Studios in Dublin.
O’Donovan’s work forms part of a number of important public and private collections including the Irish National Art Collection, Irish Museum of Applied Arts, Dublin and the Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
 
nualaodonovanartist.com

Linda Sormin explores fragility, upheaval, migration, survival and change through sculpture and site-responsive installations. She was a 2021 participant at European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands, creating new work for three exhibitions: Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, USA (October 16, 2021 – April 2, 2023), No Boundaries at Messums, London, UK, a solo exhibition at Messums, Wiltshire (March 5 – May 1, 2022), and a two-person exhibition at Peach Corner Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (September 29 – November 5, 2022).
Sormin lives and works in New York City, and is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She has taught ceramics at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College and Alfred University. Born in Bangkok, Thailand, Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She has a BA in English Literature and worked in community development for four years in Thailand and Laos. She received degrees from Andrews University (BA, English Literature, 1993), Sheridan College (Diploma, Craft and Design, 2001) and Alfred University (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2003). Sormin’s work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC, USA), Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON, Canada), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY, USA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), Arizona State University Museum, (Tempe, AZ, USA), World Ceramic Exposition (Gyeonggi Province, Korea), and Schein-Joseph Museum of Ceramic Art (Alfred, NY, USA).
 
Clay streams above and veers past, willing me to compromise, to give ground. I roll and pinch the thing into place; I collect and lay offerings at its feet. This architecture melts and leans, hoards objects in its folds. Forms lurch, dare you to approach, space collapses with the brush of a hand.
 
Nothing is thrown away – this immigrant lives in fear of waste. Old yoghurt starts a new batch. Images glitch and flow. What is worth risking for things to get juicy, rare, ripe? What might be discovered on the verge of things going bad?
 
lindasormin.com

She received a B.A (Hons) Contemporary Applied Art, Ceramics, Glass & Textiles from Crawford College of Art & Design in 2018, and was the CCAD Ceramic Department Resident Artist for September ’18 to June ’19.
 
Bernadette’s ceramic work revolves around articulating her explorations by sea into hidden, undeniably beautiful sea sculpted places, through her sculptural Ceramic vessels. She endeavours to express this beauty and vulnerability of the extraordinary energy of water on rock into her ceramic vessels.
Bernadette was a ship’s captain for many years in California. Today her affinity with the Ocean is reflected in her ceramic vessels, photography and glass work which emulates and celebrates County Cork seascapes discovered while kayaking along the local Atlantic coastline.
 
bernadettetuite.com

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995.
Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate.
Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas. Peake’s work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world.
By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake’s painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Their painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.
 
Peake has exhibited and presented performance at: National Gallery (2021), touring to Southwark Park Galleries(2023), Fruit Market Edinburgh (2023), Towner  Hayward Eastbourne (2024). Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Groupius Bae, Berlin (2022)  Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).
 
florencepeake.com

Clay is a central material in William Cobbing’s work, both in its raw and fired forms, which he explores through sculpture and performance. In his videos people are covered in craggy clay masks, often joining each other together, repetitively manipulating the amorphous surface with deadpan detachment. Boundaries between the protagonists are blurred, raising the question as to whether we shape the environment around us or if it shapes us. With the figures partly buried under clay there’s a shift from visual to tactile communication, leading to contradictory feelings of sensuousness and suffocation.
There’s a reciprocation between the videos and glazed ceramics, with mask and hand shapes often emerging from formless ceramic mounds, as if the sculptures are caught in a state of becoming. Ceramic tiles are created as bases for text to be scored into their surface, covers of books referenced, and bas-reliefs of scenes of the clay covered figures, captured like video stills.
 
Cobbing studied BA Sculpture at Central St Martins, De Ateliers artists’ institute in Amsterdam, and a PhD by Practice at Middlesex University.
He was awarded the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at Ruskin School and British School at Rome, resulting in the ‘Gradiva Project’ at Freud Museum and Camden Arts Centre (2007-8). Cobbing undertook residencies at Turquoise Mountain in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2010, and Tokyo Arts and Space in 2014. Ceramic works produced during the Norma Lipman Fellowship at Newcastle University formed his touring solo exhibition ‘Transactions of The Duddo Field Club’ at mima Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and the Hatton Gallery in 2014. In 2021 he completed a residency at EKWC European Ceramics WorkCentre, Holland.
He has exhibited in several survey exhibitions of ceramic practice, including ‘A Secret History of Clay’ TATE Liverpool (2004), ‘Further Thoughts on Earthy Materials’ Kunsthaus Hamburg and GAK Bremen in (2018), ‘LER/CLAY!’ Museum Jorn, Denmark (2019) ‘Human After All’ Keramiekmuseum Princessehof, Holland (2020/21) ‘Human Conditions of Clay’ Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (2021/22). Cobbing will be presenting a solo exhibition at Airspace Gallery as part of The British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-upon-Trent this September.
 
William Cobbing on Instagram

Kate O’Kelly, originally from Co. Wicklow is based in Cork where she lectures on the Contemporary Applied Art course at Crawford College of Art and Design.
She works primarily with Ceramics, specilising in slip casting and model making. Her practice is influenced by an interest in adapting established craftsmanship techniques and combining new technologies with traditional production methods.
O’Kelly’s playful approach to form and a curious attention to process results in delicate, fine porcelain pieces. Often working with assemblages, O’Kelly’s work references the role of objects and memory, and how material culture and architectural spaces resonate with our sense of identity. 
Awards include a Future Makers Innovation award in 2014, the Golden Fleece Merit prize in 2015 and the RDS Craft Awards Emerging Maker, 2017. In 2018 She represented Ireland at the European Ceramics Context Biennial in Bornholm, Denmark. 
 
Kate O’Kelly on Instagram

Belfast born Simon Kidd graduated with a degree in Ceramic Design from Central Saint Martins in London, and currently lives and works in Dublin.
Simon uses a variety of processes – including throwing, slip casting, press moulding, and hand-building – as well as wood, gas, and electric-fired kilns to create sculptural ceramic forms that are meditations on place. He often incorporates site-specific materials – such as granite, basalt, limestone, wood ashes, and turf ash – gathered from around the island of Ireland and used as inclusions in the clay body and in glazes.
 
He is currently working on a body of work while on residency on Oileán Chléire, an offshore island Gaeltacht, where he is making through live land casting and firing pieces in a custom built hybrid kiln while incorporating the use of materials collected from the island.
Simon’s work was included in Ceramics Ireland’s penultimate LAND/MARKS triennial show at Farmleigh Gallery, which then travelled to Argillà Italia in Faenza, Italy in September 2022, and is currently on show in the National Design and Craft Gallery in Kilkenny. He has had a number of solo shows at Erskine Hall & Coe gallery in London, and has shown at Collect, also in London, with Alveston Fine Art. He was shortlisted for the MullenLowe NOVA Award for emerging creative talent in 2018.
 
Objects, sculptures, vessels, artefacts. They always begin with a place, with its stories and feelings it
evokes.
 
My pieces respond directly to a place, they are embedded and coated with materials gathered from there. The forms informed by what is found there, or what once was there. I want these pieces to become artefacts of their place – to be physical connections to the land they’re born out of. Working with ceramics, I utilise different processes: throwing, slip casting, press moulding, hand-building.
I allow the project I work on to inform the processes used. The constant thread throughout my work is the use of local materials, which are used as inclusions in the clay body or else as glazes – granite, basalt, limestone, wood and plant ashes. Endless possibilities for what can be used as well as how. This constant experimentation and learning it creates is an important part of my practice.
 
Simon Kidd Ceramics

Vicky Langan is a Cork-based artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly sound, performance, and film.
Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art. Using simple raw materials such as domestic objects, hair and magnetic tape, she layers physical gestures and scraps of sound to create intensely personal imaginary landscapes. Mundane domesticity is explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious.

Andrea Williams is an Irish-Cape Verdean multidisciplinary artist, gravitating between dance, experimental theatre and visual arts. Based in Cork, Ireland, Andrea is working on the dream to express feelings, emotions, and beauty through fashion, movement and performances; she is all about bridging the gaps between sound and physicality, truly translating the music into meaningful and touching body movements.
Her recent work includes Undefined as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, Hive City Legacy at Dublin Fringe Festival, EPG (Exploitation, Power, Greed) with Olympio, and Dubh for FeliSpeaks. She has also worked with artists such as Ed Sheeran, Denise Chaila, Tolu Makay, Burnaboy, Jafaris and Loah. As a youth worker Andrea works with teens living in Direct Provision, with LGBTQ teens, as well as with Kabin Studio and Music Generation.