The Celtic Hand Craft

The Celtic Hand Craft

By Paul McCann

I was amazed at how many Irish people I met at the National Folk Festival in Canberra . Storytellers, singers,  songwriters , poets , fiddlers , whistlers and even Irish hand craft jewellery makers . I spoketo0 as many as I could about the impact of how their Irishness is making an impact in Australia.

One of these people was a man by the name of Desmond McKenzie -Harris

Des originally came from Andersonstown in the upper Falls district of Belfast . Desi owns Celtic Dreaming ,a Celtic Jewellery business in Australia . He and his family travel around the country bringing his original hand made products with him . If you should buy one of Desi's products not only do you get a beautiful broach blessed with its makers magic but you also get information about its origin . I spoke to Desi about his Celtic designs and also about our Celtic heritage . Now I would like to share with you some of what we spoke about . I asked Desi how long he has been in Australia and he said

Going on about forty years , give or take the years when he went back to live in South of Ireland living down in West Cork and Kerry .

I asked him if he was making his Celtic hand crafted jewellery when he was there and he said he was mostly trying to make some sort of a living doing antique furniture restoration with a couple who had pulled him in off the street . A  funny sort of English couple they were pretty bazaar . But I was just biding my time cause I had a brother coming over and we had bought a little property in Glengarrath just along by Lord Bantry's walls , in the woods itself . I spent a lot of time drawing and identifying wild flowers from the west of Ireland cause of an extraordinary wealth of biological material there and wandering round looking at standing stones and various historical sights like that . What I didn't understand at the time was that I was standing on one of the oldest copper mines in western Europe and that was over in Missen Head on Mount Gabriel. All through West Cork the quartz rock is shot through with this beautiful green copper and up in Mount Gabriel there's ancient mines that are there and the remains of the stone were breaking the copper ore out of the wall as well . There is a lot of sites that litter the hillside and these are diggings that are only now in the past thirty or forty years people have become aware of its significance and depth of age in a metal working history . Also you'd look at the landscape around West Cork and Kerry and see its desolate and you'd go into the bogs and dig away and you'd find lumps of trees and bark and pine and stuff . Then you'd look at the history of it was deforested not just by the English but by ourselves in the manufacturing  of bronze and copper, because it takes so many tons of wood  

to produce a couple of kilos of copper ore . With that though in mind in relation to the turf in the bogs , I remember during the industrial revolution the Russians were interested in buying up our Irish turf because it was cheaper that buying coal and the fact that turf was a slow burner made the West coastal areas in Ireland a very big asset for them . But there is such a wealth in Ireland not only with the turf and the mineral ore but also recently with treasures that have been unearthed with the digging  that has been taking place in and around the Boglands . The various designs and patterns on some these treasures have been used by people like yourself who make Celtic jewellery . With your own jewellery Des where do get your inspiration and designs from ?

Well I'm inspired enormously by the wealth of metal work from the ninth and tenth century in AD Ireland . There is a series of broaches as well that came out from this second century BC , out of the dark age  . Ireland went through a dark age from about sixth century BC to third century BC where it actually lost contact with Europe . There was a marked rise in the building of hill forts but the landscape changed . There seemed to have been some sort of climate change took place . A lot of the fields fell into bog . Around about five thousand years ago the actual Neolithic farmers themselves lost enormous tracks of land due to climate change and its into those bogs where you can go down six or seven feet and find whole farms buried beneath the bog . A wealth of farm land of walls and buildings but the metal work that I'm concentrating on is the masterpieces of the Celtic church and also the secular work that took place and one of the surprises that came to me was that the forming of the metal or what's called the chip faceting that the Irish metal smiths used was actually introduced to them from the Germanic tribes that the Irish encountered when the Irish were invading and recolonising Britain after

The fall of the Roman Empire in 540 AD  . It was called kirptsnit wood carving that the Irish incorporated that into wax because one of the greatest food sources in Ireland was of course  honey a by-product of honey was wax and that had always been used since early bronze age as a form of casting and its going back to that lost wax casting and carving process that I have found myself in love with and in love with the great annular broaches . It might be the Ballyspillane broach or the London Spur broach  or the Hunterson broach and of course the famous one, the Tara broach which was actually found in Bettystown in 1870 . People didn't know that the Irish had done such amazing  works because of colonization by the English and the destruction of our culture . Then it starts coming to light around the 1870's with the bringing in of railways and the cutting out  railway tracks across bogs and a lot of the metal work was turning up then . Dug up by workmen and either sold on to collectors people like Lord Petry . You know the term the Petry dish . Well he was also a collector of antiquities as a lot of those people were during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries  . So Lord Petry obtained what's called the Petry Crown which was a first or second century AD Irish bronze crown .

It was found in Cork and is a great example to go looking through .

It is covered in spirals . Its very reminiscent of second century AD bronze work from England if you look what the Britons were doing .

Spirals are always inspired by nature and that's what keeps coming back to me is the knot work and the spirals . Its either the tendrils of trees or its mathematical  plotting of the souls journey . There is a similarity between the Irish Celtic circle and indigenous or aboriginal drawings  . Well that's the gift .

The spiral is perhaps the most human expression in art and you can travel through the Maori, in fact Maori bone carving is so much like the Lithane period in Celtic history .  Lithane and New Grange spirals which are like six thousand years old . You can go to aboriginal art  you can go to African art or South American art with key patterns even and it is a human art . It's looking at what natures doing .

These are people who watched for weeks on end the movement of the sky and it moved in a spiral . The spiral is perhaps one of the greatest expressions of the human soul .

It's true to say looking at the life of the early Celt that their spirituality was

very focused on the world around them . The brook that bubbled and the der that hoofed the mountain was taken into consideration . Even though Christ had not yet appeared on Earth they realised someone had actually created everything around them and that is evident in their art work and in their music It was a Celtic celebration of that great someone who created the world around them .  Now a few thousand years later Des here you are continuing that work . It also an original statement you're making today with the Celtic jewellery you're creating .

It is because we're working in a  time now where mass production of jewellery for mass consumption . The loss of the human hand in the work has been recognised by  people like William Blake who were looking at raising up the hand craft work and the hand craft industry of the nineteenth century .

He tried to get socialism a leg into society were getting people back into the industry with all the old skills instead of the industry were the hand work of people had been lost to the machine .

What Desmond is trying to do is not being a goodie-goodie type of person but rater it’s a love and respect for what took place in the past with our Irish culture . What's happening today is all for money . Many of companies have gone to Thailand and the people are working for next to nothing and they're mass producing Celtic designs and they're brought back in and sold as, but its not . There are people working in Ireland who I don't know for whatever reason they're not looking back at the shadow work and the detail of the beautiful broach work that took place in the past and trying not for money but to take the time to finish the piece . To put the time and the skill into it . It's a painful thing but it can be done .

 Its within and pain or suffering that many talented artists have obtained some image or picture or whatever art form imprints itself on our physic . I think if anything is suffered for it will last forever . In saying all that its also true that  because we are human we are imperfect and the battle artists sometimes have is for their artwork to attain  perfection .

What's interesting is if you look at something like the book of Kells that has been done by hand but they used tools that we would recognise today .

They used a form of French curves, they used a form of stencilling ,

they had rulers to rule out the pages . They used graph paper it wasn't done like some Zen  artist where it comes out straight from the hand .They used rulers to get those straight lines in there . That beautiful perfection of performing and  putting together the chemistry to make the paints,

but what they did was in the perfect knot work coming through they would deliberately put in a mistake in it because it wasn't right for humans to be perfect . It was something that was for God .

We can try to be perfect but we will always fall short of that .

We are just like a tool in the hands of the master . I think when God created humans he spent a little more time on the Celts . Their lifestyle has brought  

An alternate meaning to life in the modern world we live . New waves of conscious are flowing into areas that span the globe . Has your Celtic background reached into other places with who and what you are ?

When Desmond came out from Andersontown to Australia he ended up living on the largest hippy commune  in the country and the second largest commune in the world In Huntable Falls I got to see people living alternate lifestyles .

A lot of it left me thinking , it's a bit extreme . People can become very  extreme for various reasons of letting go . I think I get a bit wound up with the American West Coast spirituality paths . It gets up my goat with all the Cosmic this that and the other . I think its making out something of what wasn't there . Like they ask , what's this knot mean ? Was there some astrological symbol  to it ?  Well there bloody well wasn't . We don't what these people had in mind  making these designs with but we do know it was an adoration of God and it was done specifically for the eyes of God . I think something like the book of Kells wasn't actually for human eyes . It was done for the glory of God . 

Modern Day Celtic jewellery with ancient designs and a long heritage of Irish culture hand crafted for people today in the 21^st Century .

The End