In the townlands of Derryaun, which means ‘Little Oakwood’, nestling in the soft hills in view of Croagh Patrick in Co Mayo, you’ll find Suzie Sullivan beavering away at making glass beads, fairies and felted landscapes, all largely inspired by her surroundings.
Born in Lytham St. Anne’s in Lancashire in 1953, Suzie and her husband Steve moved to Co Mayo ten years ago. Their love of Irish music and Ireland brought them to Westport to Matt Molloy’s pub where they still occasionally join in music sessions. Suzie plays tin whistle and bouzouki while Steve plays tenor banjo and guitar.
There’s so much creativity produced by Suzie in her studio that it’s difficult to know where to begin: “The needled felted figures, I suppose, they came first. I started learning needle felting from a book and the first thing I ever made was awful. After much experimentation I began making wire armatures for the figures so that you can actually move them around. I want them to be sitting around the place, not in a glass case standing still. They usually have long legs and cute faces with conical hats, and hair the natural colour of the fleece. I use the wool from Teeswater and Wensleydale sheep and both of those breeds have very curly locks. You just wash the fleece and tease it. It’s got its own natural movement. My wonderful friend and inspiration, Janet Phillips from the Threshing Barn in Staffordshire, sent me a skein of sari silk and I decided to make some fairies. I don’t normally use such bright colours, but it definitely did it for me.”
Entranced by the fairies I studied their little silver hands, their legs wrapped with wool and sari silk – woven with a threaded needle, their puffy sleeves in chiffon, embroidered buttons, French knots and buckles; holding fir tree cones from the garden, with their red mouths and eyes needle felted and enhanced with a bit of dull rouge blusher on the cheeks.
Suzie went on to talk about the techniques she uses in creating her felted and framed landscapes. “I use traditional wet felting methods with hand dyed wool and silk. All the dyeing is done in the workshop and I compose the picture using dry wool. Once the composition has been laid out I use hot water, soap and friction to matt the fibres together so that it’s a self-supporting fabric. Then I roll the whole piece up in a big bamboo blind … and roll it and roll it. That’s the friction part. I use grated olive oil soap which I put in a jar of boiling water. It makes a gel and that gets rubbed on. Lots and lots of rolling – it would take well over an hour to make the fluffy soft fibres matt together into a really rigid piece of material.
“For the composition, I start with a white background, adding in the sky … which is just wool pulled and laid on. The mountains are fashioned from hand dyed wool that comes in a sheet rather than in what we call wool top. A wool top is a rope of fibre; it’s like a long continuous rope of fibre pointing in the same direction. There is another type called batting that comes in a wide roll, and prior to felting I would dye the wool batting and rip it apart, and then use it to create the mountains. The little white bits would be tiny bits of wool, just pulled and laid on top of the colour to represent mist. The forefront would be finished off, once the piece is dry, with a felting needle. It’s a very sharp needle with barbs on it pointing downwards. You work on a foam pad and every stab takes a little bit of fibre into itself or into the base fabric that you’re using; you can build up layers and put pebbly things into it and you can use rougher wool and create a nice surface texture. It will all be hand dyed before I start and I have a big mountain of wool on the floor from where I’ll be picking bits – ‘Oh, that bit is going to go there and that bit is going to go there.’ It takes a long time to do each piece.
“I use an Australian dye, an acid dye called gaywool, and the colours are exquisite, really earthy.”
We moved over to the part of her studio set up for glass bead making and Suzie explained as she demonstrated. “This is a propane and oxygen torch which creates a clean-shaped flame.” She put on a pair of didymium lens glasses. “I have to wear safety glasses to protect my eyes. This is a mandrel,” and she showed me a wand-like instrument, “… and this is a glass rod.” There is a compartmentalised shelf at the side of her table, holding different coloured lengths of glass looking like slim sugar sticks about a foot long. “I have to heat the mandrel – and the white stuff on the end is called bead release. If I was just to melt the glass onto the steel mandrel it would actually stick and you would never get it off. The bead release is a clay-like solution and it enables me to remove the bead from the mandrel with ease.”
We discuss the fact that it’s fairly costly to set up glass bead making, as you have to have the kiln, the mandrels and the glass rod stocks. “… and the extraction fan. You see, I’m wrapping the glass onto the rotating mandrel. If I stopped the mandrel turning, the glass could just gloop off. It’s like runny honey really and so it’s a skill that takes a lot of time to master. You need to understand the heat and the glass to get good results. It took me a year to learn the craft, I’ve been doing it for three years, and I still don’t consider myself that wonderful at it. I really enjoy it.” She brandished the mandrel. “So that’s a little bead. If you wanted to decorate it you would use different colours of glass rods … and the world’s your oyster! You can use opaque glass and you can use transparent glass. I actually do mountain scenes on my beads. You can leave your dots proud or you can melt them in and have them nice and smooth and shiny. So that would be a bead made – and now it goes into the little kiln here,” and she leaned over to balance the glass bead on the mandrel in the kiln. “The kiln is set to 950 degrees and the beads sit there overnight with the temperature ramping down very slowly. This anneals the beads and gives them strength and durability. We like to think of each bead as an art form, not just a bead. It’s art glass.”
As we wrapped up the interview, Suzie chuckled over this little story: “I was sitting at my torch, concentrating, working away making beads, and all of a sudden I smelt gas and I thought flipping heck – it was just awful, really strong. I switched the torch off, opened all the windows and all the doors and ran out in this muck sweat … and they were muck spreading next door! The smell of the muck spreading was coming in and was so like gas. I thought I was going to go up in smoke. I thought that was gas! It could only happen living out in the country.”
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