A kid in a Candy Store
Well I did manage to attend the RDS Crafts Fair last weekend. I live in Cork, so I had to travel up by train to Dublin in the early hours. On a dank, miserable day, it was great to eventually get to the RDS and enjoy my ‘kid in a candystore’ experience there. The place was packed to the rafters with all manner of Artisan work and I didn’t have to look hard to find something of interest.
I had a nice chat with Thomas Wollen who specialises in rather unique ceramics, an example of which you see above. I asked him if he had a website and it turned out he created his own website. Now I really like the design of his website and it does a good job of highlighting his work. The problem with the website for me is that there is nobody visiting it (according to the hit counter, there have only been about 30 visitors to date). This seems an awful pity, because I think you’ll agree, his work is quite unique and worthy of way more attention then this. What I would like to suggest is that Thomas creates a blog for his work. This should dramatically improve his statistics in a short period of time (bearing in mind that my humble and relatively new and under marketed blog already gets over 20 hits in a day). In the interest of kick starting artisan blogging in Ireland, I am prepared to design, set up and provide free hosting for Thomas, to prove this. What do you think Thomas?
I hope to do individual posts on several artists in the new year and may be even able to wangle an interview out of some of them. Here are a couple of tasters from the show. Click on the images to be taken to the site of the artisan.
Some more interesting ceramics
There were lots of excellent Black and White Photographers. Unfortunately not all of them had websites…sigh:-(
So overall, I was delighted with my experience there. I met up with Philip Pankov too. Many thanks for the invite Philip. I must have talked to about 30 different artists. When I mentioned blogging, most of them didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, unfortunately. Hense the big essay the other day.
Christmas is fast encroaching, so I’m going to wind down artisan reviews until sometime after Christmas. I will keep posting videos though, maybe even a mini virtual film festival….who knows;-)
technorati tags:RDS, Crafts, Fair, Artisans, online shopping Ireland, Christmas Shopping, unique
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4 comments
Permalink1
One problem with blogging is that the term itself is so lame that it devalues the act and effect of blogging. Particularly for the Irish who have such a strong history of excellent writing, it’s no wonder it hasn’t caught on.
Great idea about Thomas Wollen. Does he want to write a weblog (that’s better), though? What about him putting a few things in an Etsy store with a link to his website. He should remove his counter and use Statcounter instead!
Permalink2
I think you’re right. Blog is such a difficult word to sell. It sounds a bit like blob or blot , not really a serious word at all. But I suppose thats, in a way, the reason why it has held. It conveys a casualness which is at the core of the blogging ethos.
Maybe I am being a bit presumptious about Thomas wanting to write a blog. I am so sold on blogging myself that I just presume everybody else should feel the same way. Using Etsy is also a great idea too. When last I looked on etsy there were only a handful of Irish people selling on it, believe it or not.
Permalink3
Paul,
What if you started an Irish group artisan blog where everyone would commit to writing one post a week or something like that. I do think that blogging takes an enormous amount of time and readers don’t like it if you only blog once and a while - I think that they just stop coming by.
Permalink4
Excellent idea Maryam. I need to ponder the mechanics of it, but it definitely makes sense. Merci:-)
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