EMMA’S WONDERFUL WIRE ARTWORK
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF CALLED TO THE GREYSTONES HOME OF FORMER DRESS DESIGNER EMMA RUSHWORTH, WHOSE IMPRESSIVE WIRE SCULPTURES OF FAIRIES AND FOXES ARE IN DEMAND NOT ONLY IN IRELAND BUT ALL AROUND THE WORLD
FORMERLY a fashion designer and now an accomplished creator of small sculptures, each made from hundreds of strands of wire, Emma Jane Rushworth is making herons this week. Her output also includes close to life size hares and foxes and pheasants, along with exotically winged fairies, in a style which is at once romantic and realistic – as well as very much in demand. She jokes that her career has taken her from frocks to fairies, suggesting a nice headline to her press interviewer.
The studio behind the house is her refuge, surrounded by rolls of wire, with hammers and snippers to hand, while pictures and sketches of dancers and wildlife are stuck to the wall to provide inspiration. Her home was one of the cottages built for soldiers returning from the trenches of World War One. Originally, each one came with enough land for a potato patch and a pig-sty. The potato patch is long gone and now the area reserved for the pigs has made way for the studio.
First things first, is it Emma or Emma Jane? The Greystones based sculptor agrees that no one actually calls her Emma Jane in everyday conversation. It’s Emma every time.
To Irish ears, Emma Rushworth sounds distinctive enough but she insists that when it comes to the business of Google searches then it is best to have the three-pronged name.
The Jane is added as part of the branding exercise, for the simple reason that it makes her easier to find on the internet. And the internet is very definitely where to find her as she sells her wares on the world wide web – such is the reality for the modern artist.
Though she loves living in Greystones and adores the Co. Wicklow countryside, the work she creates in the wooden studio behind her home is as likely to be found in Britain or New Zealand as in Ireland.
Second, that is not a Wicklow accent, is it? Indeed not, though she has been here for at least 15 years and very much intends to stay.
The voice is more English than anything else and her parents live in Henley-onThames on the outskirts of London. Emma has lived a cosmopolitan life which gives her a richly varied background and she has held down high powered jobs in Asia as well as in Europe.
She reveals that she was born in Zambia for the simple reason that her father was working there at the time – all of 46 years ago – in the copper mining industry. Her African start to life left little or no impression as the Rushworths left that posting soon after her birth, while she was still a small baby. They then moved around, calling at Bradford and Aberdeen in the UK, Denmark and Norway further afield along the way, through a childhood of repeated shifts. She found the constant change dictated by her father’s career quite difficult, so that she now appreciates deeply the luxury of being able to put down roots with husband Paul and the couple’s two young children. Emma harks back to her days as a student, enrolling as a young woman at the university in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north east of England. Her chosen course was fashion, though this was fashion with a distinctly commercial edge, not the haute couture of the Paris cat-walk.
‘We learned how to makee clothes – and we designed for a market,’ she recalls of college days which equipped her for the world of work in the rag trade. She was a willing and talented student, her university portfolio helping her to persuade an Indian company to take her on despite her lack of experience.
Ironically, their European headquarters was in Paris where their new recruit conjured up dresses with big scarves and big cardigans for European customers, with a hint of India in each design. Her ideas were passed on to pattern cutters and seamstresses to be made real by the workers at a big factory in New Delhi, so she divided her time between the Sub- Continent and France. The firm traded under the name Nitya, establishing an aura of sophistication which went down well in London’s Bond Street, where Emma helped to set up a Nitya shop.
The next move took her into the mass market, chasing a raise in pay as she candidly admits, with a switch to Hong Kong. There in the Far East she applied her skills to make dresses for the US market which were manufactured in factories on the Chinese mainland and then exported in vast number by the container
load to be sold cheap in branches of the giant Walmart chain.
‘Hong Kong is an amazing place but I found it a very difficult way of living,’ she muses. The heat, the teeming population and the pollution began to take their toll, as she hankered for somewhere she could walk a dog in peace. She still recalls the dirt of the Hong Kong sea water with a shudder to this day. ‘I didn’t like doing the high volume stuff anymore – the work was too pressurised. I suppose that is why I ended up in Ireland.’
SHE found alternative employment in Dublin, with Michael H Limited who turned out clothes from a plant in Ballyfermot, though the design team worked in the city centre. The firm was named after Michael Heather but it was his daughter Linda who was the boss. Emma was required to conceive ‘mother of the bride’ outfits – typically two-piece plus a frilly hat – which were popular among Irish buyers, with some exports to the UK.
‘ They took me on because of my Indian and Hong Kong experience,’ says Emma, though the output from Ballyfermot was certainly on a different scale, far short of Walmart in terms of quantity. The change of pace suited her and she discovered Greystones as somewhere with the space she craved to walk a dog, thanks in large part to her Ulster-born partner-to-be Paul, who was already well ensconced in the town.
These days, she does not have to face the commute into Dublin as the Michael H business model eventually collapsed around four years ago in the face of foreign competition and of debt left by the demise of the Celtic Tiger. Being made redundant forced her to take detailed stock of her options, coming down in favour of staying put in Co. Wicklow as family life appeals so much more than designing the frocks.
At forty-plus, she felt she was reaching the end of her shelf life in the fashion industry and, besides, another job of the sort she was used to would have meant almost certainly moving abroad. That was the clincher: ‘I had to make a career change.’ It was her mother who came up with the alternative.
On a visit to her parents, her mother told how she had seen a man making figures from wire at the Henley Show and attracting plenty of customers. The older woman reckoned that Emma could make a much better fist of producing such sculptures and she laid down the challenge to her daughter.
‘I taught myself from nothing,’ she reveals. ‘Each piece is individually woven and I have my own technique.’ She began her incarnation as a sculptor by making cute chickens from galvanised garden wire, graduating to hares and foxes – ‘2017 was the Year of the Fox.’
At first she worked on the kitchen table, where dinner and sculptures under construction used to mingle chaotically. But now she has the timber studio where bronze – so much easier to bend than the steel – is her current favoured medium and ideal for the herons: ‘And now I feel like this year 2018 is the Year of the Bird!’
Paul lends a hand in the enterprise by setting EmEmma’s output against ththe scenic backdrop of ththe Wicklow countryside to take the exquisite phototographs which make the EEmma Jane Rushworth website so popular. The coupleo have explored the andn l likes Brittas of Glendalough, with their camRoundwood, Powerscourt eera in search of suitable locations to display theh wares to best effect. Thanks to such promotion followedo by orders which arrive by email, fairies fromr Greystones may now bbe found sitting on Lake Michigan or gracing a garden in New Zealand.
‘It is more of an art, where clothes and fashfashion are a necessity,’ she ponders. Most of her output ends up in private hands though she freely confesses the she would love to undertake bigger commissions for public sites.
She has already delivered three wire fishes which grace the headquarters of Bord Bia in Dublin and, closer to home, examples of her work may be admired at the Whale Theatre in Greystones. One of the high points so far of her short career as a sculptor was a collaboration with John Durston to create a garden at the Bloom festival in the Phoenix Park which featured Emma’s fox and pheasant.
‘I do love Greystones – it’s the beach,’ she exclaims. ‘I could quite happily not step out of County Wicklow ever again. I am very happy to have settled down here.’