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Cavan artist recognised as ‘Future Maker of the Year’

Damian McCarney

A Cavan glass artist’s talent has been recognised with a grant from the Design & Crafts Council of Ireland.

Aoife May Soden said that the 'Future Maker of the Year Award 2018’ was much appreciated. She intends to use it to pursue collaborative work with another Irish glass artist, Sinead Brennan.
“I was genuinely very surprised and taken aback,” Aoife says of the award worth €3,500. “It’s wonderful to have the financial support, but the recognition is really important to me – especially as an Irish person working abroad – it’s a real connection back to Ireland.”
Due to her parents jobs, she lived in Cavan when she was a child, before moving to Australia. She returned to Ireland again in 2001 and lived in her home county for a number of years. Her accent is difficult to place, particularly given her recent years living in Denmark. What took her there?
“Glass,” says the NCAD graduate without hesitation. “Predominantly glass. Pretty much all of Scandinavia has a huge tradition for blown glass.”
She explains that the sector in Ireland traditionally centres around engraving of glass and crystal, but this was severely hit by the last recession.
“It’s more difficult to do training in Ireland. So for example I lived in a small town in Denmark called Ebeltoft which has five hot glass studios – which is almost the equivalent to the number we have in Ireland in total.”


While she acknowledges that Ebeltoft – a town smaller in size than Cavan Town – has an unusually rich glass production heritage, many Danish towns have at least one glass studio; her current hometown, Aarhus, has three. Her time in Denmark has seen her hone her skills through creating design pieces. However she has also continued to pursue her artistic practice.
“I work with something particularly Irish: I look at mental health issues, of anxiety and depression, and ways to visualise catchphrases we have for explaining those difficulties in Ireland.
“We talk about the weight of depression and the weight of anxiety, or someone suffering from their nerves, or someone who might be feeling the pressure – we have a lot of these little catchphrases.”
She believes that visual language helps explain how people are feeling.
“It’s very hard to describe the symptoms of those disorders, whether you have chronic depression or chronic anxiety.”
Aoife’s beautiful works in sculpted glass focus on how depression and anxiety are felt within our organs.
“You might say ’I’m having trouble catching my breath’ – which can be a symptom of when someone is feeling really anxious or when they are really worried about something - you actually have diffculty breathing. So when I make the body organs, there’s usually an area in the body organ that illustrates damage to it. So it’s a way of opening up the body and allowing people to see what they would be feeling.
“From purely aesthetic point of view I really love the shapes and forms of the human body organs. We often forget we are these highly functioning organic machines where everything has to work together and when one part of it stops working it inadvertently affects the other parts of our bodies, so that’s where my ideas come from.”
Looking to the future, Aoife sees herself continuing to work with glass.
“It’s an amazing medium it really is. It is incredibly challenging, but from those challenges it has endless possibilities. So I think that’s what keeps a lot of glass artists going, you can really continue to push the medium and there’s people out there doing crazy-crazy things with glass al over the world.”