Getting to the heart of love and loss

Lifestyle – Cathy Hughes has had a passion for art since childhood. From an entrepreneurial family, she also had a flair for business and has combined those two passions successfully since her youth on Inis Mór. Her latest exhibition, based on Aran knitwear, was inspired by her mother and daughter, both of whom she lost too early, as she explains to DARA BRADLEY

Salthill-based artist Cathy Hughes displayed a love of painting – as well as an entrepreneurial spirit – from a young age.

“My art came out of being on the Aran Islands painting stones,” she says of her childhood interest.

The Westport native, who was schooled as a boarder with the St Louis order of nuns, spent her teenage summers on the Aran Islands.

When she was 13, her parents, Pádraig Hughes and Máire (née Kelly), bought a store on Inis Mór.

A sister to the original family shop in Westport, it was the second of what was to become the Carraig Donn retail empire.

“Daddy did his research and realised that people wanted to buy their Aran sweater on the Aran Islands,” she says.

Cathy noticed the shop didn’t sell inexpensive items; things that Gaeltacht students of the local Coláiste Samhraidh could afford to bring home as mementos.

And so she would collect stones from the beach, paint three traditional currach boats on them and sell them on the wall outside the shop, marketed as ‘presents from Aran’.

“That’s how my art enterprise started,” she explains.

The eighth in a family of 13, with three sets of twins, Cathy’s background was entrepreneurial.

Her father Pádraig took over Charles Hughes Limited in Westport, which had been started by his granduncle. This was later rebranded as Portwest, a hugely successful clothing manufacturing company run by her brothers Owen, Harry and Cathal.

Her other brothers Pat and Vincent retain Carraig Donn; named after the family home, it now boasts 40 stores.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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