Three County Waterford ceramic artists are among 42 of Ireland’s most significant makers featured in a landmark national exhibition currently showing at the National Design & Craft Gallery in Kilkenny. From the Ground Up: The Transformation of Irish Clay is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Irish ceramics in years — and Waterford’s presence at its heart says something important about where the county sits in the national craft conversation right now.
The Exhibition
From the Ground Up: The Transformation of Irish Clay opened at the National Design & Craft Gallery in Kilkenny on 21 March and runs until 18 July. Organised by Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI) and curated by ceramic scholar and writer John Goode, it brings together 42 Irish ceramic artists representing, collectively, over a thousand years of combined creative experience — a figure that speaks to both the depth of the assembled talent and the longevity of the tradition they are working within and pushing beyond.
The exhibition traces clay’s evolution in an Irish context: from regional traditions and domestic utility, through the craft revival of the 20th century, to the experimental and conceptual territory that Irish ceramics occupies today. Works by the participating artists have been exhibited across Europe, the United States, South America, Japan, China and India — a reach that reflects the growing international appetite for Irish-made ceramics and the calibre of the makers producing them. Admission is free.
“Irish ceramics are experiencing a remarkable moment,” said curator John Goode. “This exhibition celebrates artists who are pushing clay into new territories of meaning, form, and expression.” DCCI CEO Mary Blanchfield added that the participating artists “reflect and position the medium of ceramics as a vital contributor to Ireland’s contemporary design” landscape. Both statements are borne out by the work of Waterford’s three contributors.
Eileen Singleton — The Landscape in Clay
Eileen Singleton has been working in ceramic sculpture since graduating from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1983 — over four decades of sustained practice rooted in the particular landscape of West Waterford and the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains. The visual logic of her work is the terrain around her studio: the textures of rock, bog and winter light; the specific quality of stillness in those upland valleys. She uses raku clay fired to earthenware temperature, building colour and texture through repeated firings with underglaze — a process of accumulation that mirrors the geological layering of the landscape she draws from.
Alongside her sculptural practice, Singleton creates ceramic botanical monoprints — a distinctive hybrid form that uses the ceramic surface as a printing ground for botanical imagery, producing works that sit at the intersection of ceramic craft and printmaking. She also works in mosaic and teaches workshops and classes from her West Waterford studio, maintaining a connection to community and education that has run alongside her exhibition career throughout.
The recognition has been consistent and significant. In 2019 she won the Irish Ceramics Award at Sculpture in Context at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin — one of the most prestigious awards in the Irish ceramics calendar. Her work is held in galleries including Gallery Zozimus, Lavit Gallery and Mill Cove Gallery, and she accepts public, corporate and private commissions. More than forty years in, the work shows no signs of reaching a comfortable plateau. That sustained restlessness is the mark of a serious artist.
Jane Jermyn — A Second Life in Clay
Jane Jermyn’s story is a reminder that the most interesting creative lives are not always the ones that begin earliest. She came to ceramics in her mid-forties and has been a practising artist since 1998 — earning her BA from West Wales School of the Arts in 2001 and her MA from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 2009. What followed that relatively late start has been, by any measure, an extraordinary career.
From her studio in County Waterford, Jermyn produces organic ceramic sculptures — textural, biomorphic, pod-like forms that seem less made than grown. Inspired by the processes and structures of the natural world, her work explores what clay can do when it is coaxed rather than commanded: surfaces that suggest bark, seed casing, weathered bone; forms that wrap and caress the air they enclose. There is a biological quality to the best of her pieces — an impression that you are looking at something that has its own interior life.
In 2017 she was elected to the International Academy of Ceramics based in Geneva — one of the most selective honours available to a ceramic artist, and one that places her in the company of the most significant practitioners of the medium worldwide. Awards from the Irish Arts Council, the DCCI, Culture Ireland, and ArtLinks have followed, as have exhibitions in the United States, France, Spain, Japan, Cuba, China, Argentina, Croatia, India and beyond — a truly international exhibition record that began, and remains rooted in, a studio in County Waterford.
Since March 2020, Jermyn has also been part of Market House Craftworks in Cappoquin — a studio, retail space and gallery that has become one of West Waterford’s most important cultural addresses. Her involvement there connects the international dimension of her practice to the local creative community in a way that benefits both.
Cora Cummins — The Mindful Maker
Cora Cummins’s story is the kind that stops you. After graduating from art college in 2000 and working as a production potter, she became a ceramics tutor at Dungarvan College. Then, in 2011, she lost her son. It was in the aftermath of that loss that she found her way back to clay — not as a profession, but as a means of healing, grounding and, eventually, rediscovery. The practice that emerged from that experience is as considered and intentional as any in Irish ceramics today.
Working from her studio in Villierstown, West Waterford, Cummins creates small-batch ceramics using slow, meditative hand-building techniques — a deliberate counterpoint to the speed and volume of industrial production and even to the faster rhythms of the pottery wheel. Each piece is made with care that goes beyond craft skill into something closer to a philosophy of making: own less, love what you own. Her ceramics are designed to be used in daily life and to become more meaningful through that use — the coffee cup held every morning, the bowl that earns its place on the shelf.
She is the creator of the Mindful Mug — a vessel that has become something of a signature and that embodies the values of her practice in a form accessible to a wide audience. The commercial intelligence behind it is real: a product that communicates a philosophy in its form and finish, without requiring any explanation, is exactly what a gift-buying public responding to overconsumption is looking for.
Recognition has come quickly and from credible sources. Cummins won the DCCI Future Maker Award in 2023 and the RDS Crafts Award in 2024 — two of the most significant early-career honours in Irish craft. She is a member of the Mór Artists Collective and is listed with the Dungarvan and West Waterford Chamber of Commerce, maintaining a strong connection to the community around her. She registered her business in February 2020 — four weeks before the country locked down — and built it in the circumstances that followed. The resilience that required is not incidental to the work.
Three Artists, One County, One Living Tradition
What is striking about Singleton, Jermyn and Cummins, taken together, is how different their journeys into ceramics have been — and how clearly each of them reflects something true about West Waterford and the creative conditions it provides. The landscape is in Singleton’s raku surfaces. The slowness and the sense of deep time are in Jermyn’s biomorphic forms. The grief, the healing and the determination to make things worth keeping are in Cummins’s hand-built vessels. Three different women, three different practices, all working within a mile or two of the same mountains and rivers.
Irish ceramics has been gathering momentum for several years — driven by a consumer shift toward craft objects, a growing market for high-quality Irish-made goods, and a generation of makers who have combined serious technical training with a clear-eyed understanding of where their work sits in the wider culture. From the Ground Up at the DCCI gallery in Kilkenny is the most coherent public statement of that momentum to date. The fact that three of its 42 artists come from one county — and from a cluster of studios in the same corner of West Waterford — is not coincidence. It is the evidence of a scene.
From the Ground Up: The Transformation of Irish Clay runs at the National Design & Craft Gallery, Kilkenny until 18 July. Admission is free. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5:30pm.
Irish ceramics are experiencing a remarkable moment. This exhibition celebrates artists who are pushing clay into new territories of meaning, form, and expression.
John Goode, Curator
