Constant Creativity’ at Sculptor Mick Wilkins’ Kilnagleary Studios, Carrigaline

Writes Leo McMahon

A man who has literally made his mark in so many positive ways with public sculptures throughout South Cork and all over Ireland is Mick Wilkins, Killeens, near Fountainstown.

Mick, at 65 years of age, is busier than ever at his workplace, Kilnagleary Studios, an exciting artistic hub located just outside Carrigaline where he said, ‘world class’ works are being produced and an exciting new chapter beckons.

Born on August 21st, 1959, the son of the late Bert and Imelda Wilkins from Douglas, Mick has six siblings. He has a daughter Naoimh in Dublin and a son Darragh, married to Marie from Quebec, Canada, a talented sculptor who has his own studio at Kilnagleary and often works in collaboration with his father.

Mick attended St Anthony’s Boys School, Ballinlough, Cork and Douglas Community School. ‘I was very good at drawing from a very young age and was selling paintings when I was 16, mainly of churches and buildings in Cork city’ said Mick.

After completing the Leaving Certificate in 1978, he went to attend Crawford School of Art in the city. ‘In the first year back then, there were different tutors giving students a taste of the different disciplines and it was possibly the last year one could get a classical training as well. A lot of our time during second and third year, I recall, was doing life model drawing.’

Mick Wilkins, Sculptor from Killeens near Fountainstown in the foundry at Kilnagleary Studios, Carrigaline.

Tutors of note he said, were Pat O’Sullivan and Ian Bibby, the latter of whom he went on to meet around 35 years later while working in the National Sculpture Factory who told him that when Mick and his fellow students were attending the College of Art, the quality of work produced was exceptional. ‘Ian brought something different and was very influential. He was tough but he made you produce the best’, said Mick, who himself attended the degree course for three years, took time out and studied a further two years to complete it.

‘At the start of my college life, I had chosen painting but soon decided I didn’t want to stand in front of an easel for the rest of my life. I got exposed to the metal, stone, bronze and other three dimensional materials. By my final year, I concentrated mainly making fine art sculptures out of wood and knew that this was want I wanted to do.’

Mick married Ger Wilson on August 24th, 1985. She got a job as an art teacher in Co Carlow and the couple rented a house 200 yards from a stone quarry at Paulstown, Co Kilkenny. ‘All I had then was a Honda 50 and I persuaded men working at the quarry to balance lumps of stone on it for me to take away and work on. The landlord had a yard like the one I work in today. He gave me a couple of chisels and I taught myself stone carving which I have ended up doing to do for the past 40 years.’

Mick got his first jobs from the quarry replacing missing stone sections in churches.

‘My first one man exhibition was actually of drawings and prints in the restaurant of the Lord Bagenal Inn, Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow in 1988 and my first of stone carvings was in County Hall, Portlaoise in 1990’.

In 1989, the couple moved to Barna, Connemara, Co Galway and four years later bought their own house in nearby Furbo. In 2003 he built his own house there after the couple separated.

‘It was during my time in Connemara that I was fortunate to become friends with Galway City Architect Darragh Bradley (RIP) and City Engineer Michael Kennedy who started throwing jobs at me for public art.’

Mick’s best known sculpture from that period was the Magdalene Laundry on Forster Street, Galway in 2008. By the time he left the city and county he had completed

numerous projects.

Furbo to Fountainstown

The economic crash that year resulted in Mick selling up and moving from Furbo to Fountainstown where he bought a cottage in 2009 and renovated it.

From 2010 to 2016, Mick Wilkins continued his work at the National Sculpture Factory (NSF) at the end of Albert Road, Cork city which in essence, he said, was not a happy period in his life. However, he continued to get more commissions, mainly from schools, in what was a very competitive tender market with very tight margins.

A place at the NSF is not permanent but Mick was fortunate to find out about the yard where, since September 2016, he is based at Kilnagleary House, just up the hill

from the County Council’s Carrigaline Industrial Estate off Crosshaven Road and overlooking the Owenabue Estuary.

The various buildings and sheds were effectively derelict and people he spoke to said he was mad, but Mick invested nearly all he had and it has grown steadily to become Kilnagleary Studios, the home for several exceptional artists and craftspeople. More recently, with the help of a private investor, he has managed to buy what is two acres site with tremendous potential.

Work at Studio

Creating a sculpture is a long, laborious but very satisfying multi-skilled process and Kilnagleary Studios does everything including design, casting, fabricating, welding and installation. Work at the premises, which is still very basic and rustic, involves at least 12 steps that begins in the workshop constructing an armature (open frame) which is covered in clay to create a mould that will be filled, if in metal, in the furnace at a temperature of up to 1,100 degrees reached in about two and a half hours.

There is also of course, straight sculpting from stone itself. The average time for public art works is four months but it can vary depending on size and intricacy etc.

Inside the foundry and drying rooms, I viewed the casts of the many different sections of a current project and also the furnace from which molten metal is poured

into the casts. Mick paid tribute to his former assistant for the past three years, sculptor Alexandra Kowczyk . He also praised son Darragh who also went to the art college in Cork,

worked in large foundries in Dublin and came to work with his father around six years ago. Darragh has his own workshop at Kilnagleary and his own clients and one of his much admired commissions is the floral metal gate of Carrigaline Community School.

Father and son help each other, especially the dangerous work using lifting irons to pour 40 kilogrammes of hot metal from the crucible removed from the German Morgan furnace into casts. Mick showed me a video of this known as the lost wax bronze casting process. Kilnagleary Studios also casts for other artists as well, he added.

'West Passage'. The Mick Wilkins sculpture at the roundabout in Passage West commissioned by the local Tidy Towns - photo Marcia D'Alton.

Constant Creativity

At 65, are you going to retire?, I asked Mick Willis. ‘No’, he replied. ‘If you can sit at a table and make a ball of clay you can still be making. Every job is different. More than anything I like to get a brief involving research that gives you an interesting idea and presents a challenge.’

‘Everything I make goes into keeping this place open. I work six days a week, sometimes seven. From home, I work on laptop stuff from about 8am and usually arrive into the studio around 9.30 and work until 7.30pm. On Sundays, I like to do a bit of gardening, go for a walk and call into to see Dad.’

Asked if he had any leisure time, he replied: ‘Some people think I’m mad but I don’t see what I do as work although it can be rough and at times dangerous. I’m constantly coming up with new designs, exploring new theories and new processes. It’s just constant creativity.’

Indeed, he said, things are looking very good for Kilnagleary Studios which currently has ten resident artists – some doing world class bespoke work for international clients in a variety of disciplines - and about the same number visiting during the course of a year.

It is on a ten year lease of which eight years are up but with financial backing, a long term future has hopefully been secured and Mick intends to develop it as a world class sculpture facility. Public funding will be sought to improve the buildings and equipment on what is a two acre site and if that happens the potential is simply

enormous, he added.

If you drive around Cork Harbour and you will see and admire several beautiful sculptures, all the work of Mick Wilkins of Kilnagleary Studios near Carrigaline. He recently gave an outline about just some of these public work projects to The Carrigdhoun.

Roundabout, Passage West

‘This is my personal favourite. I call it ‘The West Passage’ because of emigration’, said Mick. Thousands of people, many from West Cork and Kerry, would have departed from the Ferry Point in Glenbrook, Passage West on the final stage of the journey to the emigrant ships in Queenstown (Cobh) in the 19th century.

‘The personal connection for me is that my great grandfather, who arrived in Ireland with the Merchant Navy and my grandfather Herbert George Wilkins, both worked in a shipyard in Passage. The latter was a fitter and metal worker which have similar skills to sculpture. Mick’s late father, Bert, was born in Passage West 96 years ago.

‘I was approached about this by former councillor Marcia D’Alton on behalf of Passage West Tidy Towns. The bronze and stainless steel sculpture is boat shaped.

Because of the family connection, I just wanted to do something’, said Mick, adding that he still uses some of his grandfather’s tools. Completed in 2018, it enhances the

entrance to the harbour town.

Marcia D’Alton told The Carrigdhoun that the sculpture was inspired from the shipbuilding heritage of Passage West, ‘the original Port of Cork’ and represented a boat under construction. It was funded by Tidy Towns in 2017 with a Community Contract from Cork County Council. ‘It also ideally forms the centrepiece for a Christmas tree which my husband Rob illuminates every year’.

Pottery Sculpture, Carrigaline

Made of bronze with a cast concrete base, it was officially unveiled on Culture Night in September 2021and commissioned by Carrigaline Tidy Towns supported by Cork County Council, the Lions Club and Astra Construction. Totally unique, it commemorates the legacy of Carrigaline Pottery, established by Hodder Roberts and L.T.Keeling in 1928, once the area’s biggest employer and took about a year to complete. The pottery closed in 2003.

‘The sculpture is a playful assemblage in a scale of four-to-one of the wares that the pottery produced. That is, the size of every detail is four times bigger than the

original. With the advice of the pottery workers, I incorporated tools that would have been used. This is to help the viewer understand the process of working with clay.

The base structure is cast concrete, the design of which is based on a similar structure which had wheels, which when loaded with unfired pottery, was wheeled into the kiln for firing. The entire sculpture weighs around 2,000 kilogrammes,’ said Mick.

Originally located at the Owenabue car park, Mick said he is pleased that it is now on the footpath at Main Street, directly outside the former Carrigaline Pottery accompanied by a historical display panel.

St Brendan Boat, Crosshaven

Currently in Mick’s studio for repair and cleaning, he said this was originally on top of a flag mast in the square at Crosshaven for about ten years and hardly anyone knew

it was there. Made in bronze, it will be relocated to the Point Garden on a plinth. He described it as an ode to the 6 th century voyage led by St Brendan (c 484 – c 577) across the Atlantic in a leather boat which was replicated from Brandon Creek, Co Kerry to Newfoundland, Canada from 1976 to 1977 in a boat skippered by the late Tim Severin and built in Crosshaven Boatyard. Tim’s wife recently viewed it at Kilnagleary Studios. The project was commissioned by Crosshaven Development Committee (CDC) and Tidy Towns.

One of his major commissions in 2023 was a life size bronze figure of a fiddle player for Ballydesmond. ‘I got Matt Cranitch to model for this for two hours on several Fridays playing the fiddle while I took photos and then sculpted. That was one of my most enjoyable projects.’

Mick is currently working at his studio on the casts of two children at play for a housing estate in Dunmanway and another one ‘Faolain’ featuring migratory birds for a group of six cottages for elderly people who come from Ireland and different countries in Skibbereen. A visit to his workplace is a fascinating experience in itself.

In 2019, he told me, there was a request to cast high end furniture in bronze by internationally known designers. One of these is Orior, Newry who send their designs and have a showroom in New York. This work is carried out by Darragh. In 2017, Mick and Darragh cast 17 tables in bronze for the ‘Royal Suite’ for VIPs in Claridge’s Hotel, Mayfair, London.

‘A very important aspect of public works,’ Mick pointed out, ‘is health and safety. A sculpture has to be hurricane proof, safe and within budget. Every work must be passed by an engineer including the foundation, welding, the fixing process and so on.’

‘There is a huge appetite for public sculptures’, he stated. ‘I get phone calls all the time from communities all over the county for big and small projects so I’ve set up a structure whereby that if the council can come up with 40% and the local group can do the same, we can try to work something out, such as an easy payment plan. I always try to make public art sculpture at a an affordable price because I know that it’s a great way of enhancing a community and telling a story for everyone to see’.

Long may that continue Mick.

 Check the website www.wilkinsart.ie