Aoife carves her way to success with beef bones

City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta meets jeweler and craft teacher Aoife McGough

The studio of a city jewellery maker is dominated by the right side of a sperm whale’s jaw bone.  It is a massive piece, offering a bit of a wow factor actually, but it’s all in keeping with what goes on in the Seodra Bán Bone Carving Studio at 2 Victoria Place.

Bone carving has an eerie sound to it but this is no secret activity being carried out in a dark dungeon. It is a livelihood for jeweller, Aoife McGough, a young Dublin native who says moving to Galway was one of the best things she ever did.

Aoife opened the studio just three years ago, having been inspired by the traditional Maoiri craft she saw first hand in New Zealand during her travels.

But Aoife is not just a jeweller. She is a teacher of the bone carving craft and her studio is regularly a hive of activity as individuals and groups enjoy classes and get to keep the pieces they make afterwards!

“We usually take photographs of people holding up the pieces they make and we display them around the studio and the smile on their face is so rewarding because they are always so pleased, so satisfied. You don’t need any artistic ability to take the class, just patience. It involves a lot of sanding and most people are happy to sit and just do that,” she says.

Of course Aoife does have artistic ability and she always knew she would take a career path that veered towards arts and crafts, though she chose not to study art after leaving school. She opted for English and Psychology and as soon as she graduated from university, she started travelling and taught English as a foreign language in Korea and New Zealand.

It was in New Zealand that she accidentally came across bone carving. She did a class in it and loved it. Then she looked into its history and found it was an ancient craft practised in Ireland too. Combs and pendants carved from bone have been found dating back to the Viking period but today, bone is not a material used for carving or jewellery making in Ireland.

Aoife stresses that the bone she uses is almost always beef bone from the butchers and further adds that the sperm whale jaw on display is just that, an impressive display that is always a great talking point.

It was actually washed up on a shore on Inishbofin Island, where she has relations and because of her own interest in bones, she got to keep it.

“Bone was one of the first materials used by man but here in modern Ireland, people are just not used to it. It is similar to ivory but that material is illegal. There is an international agreement, CITIES, which prevents the use of illegal bone being used for commercial purposes.

“Beef bone is easy to get and is great to work work with. Apparently pig bone is too brittle.”

Aoife married last year, on Inishbofin as it happens. She met her husband, a Corkman, Kevin, while they were both Trinity students but didn’t become a couple until 2006. (He is now a GP in the Clonbur/Leenane area.)

Initially, they moved to New Zealand but after 18 months decided to return to Ireland.

“A recession had started there but nothing to what it was like here but we still decided to come home and make our life here. I had a plan and knew I wanted to open my own business. I started my business in Dublin, where I sold a few pieces in Cow’s Lane before we moved to Galway.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.