Netherlands
‘De ene stap brengt de andere voort, zo leidt elke welving of beweging in eenstuk tot het geheel. En een werk dat afis, brengt me bij het volgende. Tijdens het procesis er chaos, maar op het eind staat er een vormdie is uitgekleed tot op de essentie.’
Yna van der Meulen - Deirdre McLoughlin Beslismomenten - het grote K boek 4, 2023
UK
“Deirdre McLoughlin recounts the tale of 7th century Irish monks who set sail into the Atlantic, without oars, to see where the elements might take them. The elements that guide the ten women in this show are those of the potter’s art - earth, water, fire and air. Intrepid travelling with these elements, over lifetimes, has allowed each of them to find ‘the sparks of the unpredictable’ through which new forms may appear.”
Amanda Game - PIONEERING WOMEN exhibition curated by James Fordham and Amanda Game for Oxford Ceramics Gallery - 2021 Garth Clark: cfile on line & Grant Gibson The Design Ed
Taiwan
Terrific article in the Taipei Art Magazine which this month focuses on Kyoto. Written by the artist and curator Ting Ju Shao December 2021
“In this interview for Sonnets and Dirty Dishes Deirdre talks about what she calls ‘the great adventure’ of living deeply through her work.”
Tempy Osborne + Beth Tyrrell - Sonnets and Dirty Dishes August 2020
IRELAND
“…..when I first saw the work of ceramicist Deirdre McLoughlin in 2004, I presumed they were the work of a young artist, definitely a guy, maybe French or Italian. I was struck by the edginess of these beautifully made objects. They were spare, oddly but perfectly shaped, neither too busy nor dull, 'poised' and yet provocative.”
Roisin Murphy - OBJECTS OF DESIRE: THE IRISH INDEPENDENT June 2019
CHINA
STILL WALKING / DEIRDRE McLOUGHLIN interview with Sisyphusam March 2019
ENGLAND
“For me, the key to your work is your true humble approach to life/spirit/consciousness - subconscious and knowledge, which are tools in your bringing works to fruition. So, what stimulates you?”
Derek Culley - Art & Museum Magazine Autumn 2019
“Striving to infuse ideas into the colours applied to her clay, the dark surface of this voluminous vessel captures the depths of a vast body of water. Inspired by Amsterdam’s Ij Waterway, which is the backdrop for McLoughlin’s daily commute, the dark clay has been coiled, smoothed, polished and glazed into an expertly balanced expression of volumetric form. Heightened by deep colour, the effect is reminiscent of the late evening light reflections that give Amsterdam’s greatest waterway its allure. The undulating interior glaze also gives off a soft glow - a gleaming reminder of the earth's enigmatic core.”
Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2018 catalogue
"I tend to be drawn to sculpture that has a simple shape and a recognisable outline, when there’s nothing too complex about the form but the edges stick out and are quite striking. It’s also important that the sculpture has an element of movement, a dynamic nature that exudes from the piece. This is exactly the reason why I homed in on the work of Deirdre McLoughlin, an Irish artist who constructs these expressive forms from clay."
Mark Robinson - OEN 2016
NETHERLANDS
“Het woord ‘sense’ omschrijft voor mij nog het meest de essentie van haar werk. ‘Sense’ in de zin van zinnig en zinvol, ‘it does make sense’. Maar ook in de betekenis van ‘sensible’ beseffend, van belang, gevoelig, de zintuigen betreffend. En als ik alleen op de klank van het woord afga, denk ik aan sensatie, gewaarwording, maar ook aan sensueel. En eigenlijk is haar werk dat allemaal.”
Teja van Hoften - Klei 2015
ENGLAND
I have often felt that a ceramic vessel carries layers of meaning that are linked to its historic relationship with human survival. They remember, from their place on the gallery plinth, that their great-great-grandparents were made for milk or barley or the ashes of the dead. Sometimes I see them as palimpsests, scrubbed clean of history but with the old stories running like a background programme underneath the skin.
Eleanor Flegg - Ceramic Review, 2015
CHINA
Everything I know is in my work.
I don’t always understand what I know.
Deirdre McLoughlin, China Art Ceramic, June 2015
GERMANY
“With these two big-sized vessels, this work represents a good compromise between the various meanings of the vessel as an archetype of mankind: a food container, with a modern and perfect shape, which becomes a real sculpture in an appropriate light, a form unique as a result of being created from different models. The jury underlined the perfect dialogue between the outside - more 'matt' and metal like - and the inside - more brilliant and glazed in deep violet, both making the work a perfect, beautiful and extraordinary composition, quoting the 'vessel' nowadays.”
Jury, Keramik Europas - Westerwaldpreis 2014
FRANCE
”Les pièces de Deirdre McLoughlin s’inscrivent avec élégance et sobriété dans l’espace de l’exposition. Les lignes épurées des sculptures créent des formes tendues qui évoquent le corps et sa sensualité.”
Gaëtane Girard - La Revue de la Céramique et du Verre 2013
"They [empty forms] are eloquently economical ceramic bands that almost magically conjure up a sense of human presence, loss and memory, through their use of subtle, ambiguous forms and positive and negative space. In a way they are hardly there at all, but they are amazingly strong works".
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, March 12, 2013
….her sculpture is dynamic. This is the quality that seems most often to impress her audience: the sense of presence, and the ability of her sculptures to command the spaces where they are shown. This has nothing at all to do with story telling, or conveying a message that can as well be said or written. Her sculptures are abstract. Over and over again she hits the bull’s eye and produces another significant form.
Henry Pim, Ceramics Ireland, 2012
"Deirdre McLoughlin is one of the finest sculptors to emerge from Ireland in the 20th century.
Dr. Patrick J Murphy, Introduction to Deirdre McLoughlin - Shaping the Void -
IRELAND
"While the forms she makes are elegant, and the coloured glazes she uses sumptuous – this is often achieved by polishing and repeated firing – there is also a distinctly humorous quality to the work, a playful sensuality."
Aidan Dunne, Touching the void, The Irish Times, 18 January 2012 IRELAND
GERMANY - ENGLISH TEXT
"I know a work has come to an end when an inner logic reveals itself. The work in an instance feels right. I sense something true."
Deirdre McLoughlin, New Ceramics, May 2010
NETHERLANDS
"In werkelijkheid is het mijn eigen werk dat me inspireert. Zoals een reis waarbij de ene stap de andere voortbrengt, zo leidt elke welving of beweging in een stuk tot het geheel. En een werk dat af is brengt me bij het volgende. Als ik geen enkele inspiratie heb, ga ik toch naar het atelier, zet mijn handen in de klei en werk tot er iets gebeurt. Zoals een personage uit een toneelstuk van Samuel Beckett, ik ga door." Een sculptuur hoeft van Deirdre niet mooi te zijn, als er maar leven in zit."
Yna van der Meulen, KLEI 2008
"Deirdre McLoughlin’s work has it’s origins in a fascinating·dialogue with classical ceramic forms and functions, but it is as if the dialogue has moved on to a concern with the body as a kind of container, and her instinct for the contained void , for the tensions inherent in shape, is fantastic."
Aidan Dunne, Wall & Plinth, exhibition catalogue, January 2008
NETHERLANDS
"Het keramische werk van Deirdre McLoughlin is sculpturaal te noemen. Zacht glooiende vormen die aanvankelijk vrij gesloten, maar de laatste jaren heel open van karakter zijn. Alsof de klei ter plaatse de lucht omsluit maar deze toch voldoende uitweg biedt."
Piet Augustijn, Deirdre McLoughlin; Keramiek, juni 2007
"With the I am too, an open shape, McLoughlin has entered a new phase in her work. She is no longer coiling sculpture in space, she is trying to find the space in the form; she explains it as 'coiling around space”.
Nesrin During, Deirdre McLoughlin; Ceramics Monthly, March 2006
"McLoughlin's work is abstract and often of a size designed to be picked up in two hands. In scale, form and content the work seems body-related or biomorphic. An individual piece may conjure up lips, arms, hips or legs, but each form also carries the presence and gesture of a whole body, sometimes interacting bodies."
Hilary O'Kelly, Catalogue, The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, 2006
CLAY to SCULPTURE With ref. to Deirdre McLoughlin and Fernando Casasempere
Anne Schnittger - thesis
"De keramiek van Amlash spreekt ook tegenwoordig nog sterk tot de verbeelding. Bij een aantal hedendaagse keramisten is eenzelfde benadering te zien: de drang naar eenvoud, het zoeken naar de ideale proporties, het spel van curven en de strakke oppervlakten .......... [Deirdre Mcloughlin] creëert een spanning tussen net niet omvallen en steunen, die zich op het scherp van de snede afspeelt, en roept zo vragen en gewaarwordingen op. Ze laat ons genieten van een schitterend, gladgepolijst oppervlak, dat op een sublieme wijze het licht opvangt".
Frank Steyaert, Amlash. Modern design van 3000 geleden; Klei, november 2005
"Balance and harmony, poise and contrast in each of the individual forms as well as in the interplay of the two vessels determine the first impression here. With a powerful formal language as well as proportion and fragility of the vessel types, they present themselves as sculptural objects, spatial bodies. In addition, unspectactular and inconspicuous, there is the elegance of the material component, of the exquisite technique which also corresponds to the language of ideas: finest marble seems to have been used rather than clay, warmth and skin-like surfaces are to be found where unglazed surface defines spatial volume. Unpretentiously, nonsense is made of the ceramic discussion about vessel and sculpture".
Jury, Keramik Europas - Westerwaldpreis 2004
“The sculptures of Deirdre McLoughlin do not overtly tell a story. She uses clay to make organic forms which she describes as biomorphic, a term often used to describe the work, among others, of Hans Arp and Brancusi, both of whom included carving in marble in their oeuvres. Some of Deirdre McLoughlin’s ceramic forms have the smooth, pared down, precise simplicity of the results of that process. Her working method is, of course, quite different, starting with the soft shapeless material of clay.”
Betty Blandino, The Figure in Fired Clay, 2001, London, A&C Black Publishers.
"McLoughlin's significance is that she is the sculptor who found in ceramic, the medium to express herself, and very selectively chose and developed what she needed without any reference to existing conventions".
Michael Robinson, Swimming in the Pool, Ceramic Review, 1995
"McLoughlin's recent work is immensely skillful in all respects, but the less we notice the skill, the more interesting and moving its is.......She is the real thing - a sculptor of some power".
David Brett, Circa 2 Magazine, Northern Ireland, 1994
