Where Robin’s World Began
Creativity has been part of my world for as long as I can remember. As a child, I drew, created and spent hours absorbed in my own imaginative world.
By my early teens, my artwork was being entered into competitions, leading to numerous awards and recognition through the Scholastic Art Awards. That recognition led to a fully funded scholarship to attend the New York State Summer School of the Arts (NYSSSA), School of Visual Arts, in Fredonia, New York.
Only around 150 high school students from across New York State were selected each summer, making it an extraordinary opportunity for a young artist. For an entire summer, I was surrounded by other young creatives and immersed in making art.
I was, quite literally, living in Robin’s World.
And it was there that something began that would remain with me for life:
The love of clay.
Life eventually took me away from art for many years, but that part of me never completely disappeared.
Returning to Clay
Years later, after moving to Ireland and during the breakdown of my marriage, I found myself spending a great deal of time with the land around me.
There was something about the landscape here that spoke to my imagination. I felt deeply connected to the energy of the land, and slowly the idea for a collection called Fairies in the Garden began to emerge.
At the same time, I was finding my way back to myself — and back to clay.
I sat down and created my first sculpture, Surprise.
She became my freedom piece — created during a time when I was processing the ending of one chapter of my life and beginning another. As my hands worked with the clay, that feeling I had experienced years earlier at NYSSSA returned.
It felt like coming home.
The Beginning of Fairies in the Garden
Soon afterwards, I created Circle of Friends.
With just those two sculptures in hand, I gathered the courage to walk into Frank Lewis Gallery and show Frank my work. I told him about my idea to create a collection of twenty sculptures and my hope that, one day, I might have an exhibition of my own.
Frank took both pieces straight away, but explained that it could take years for an emerging artist to be offered her own exhibition.
I left delighted that he had accepted my work.
Then, not fifteen minutes later, his secretary called.
Could I have all twenty pieces ready for an exhibition that December?
I was shocked.
That phone call changed everything.
What had begun as a connection with the Irish landscape, a return to clay and two little sculptures became Fairies in the Garden — my first exhibition and the beginning of my career as an artist.
Over the months that followed, the little world I had imagined began to come to life in clay.
I created fairies hiding amongst flowers, relaxing in the garden, playing together and simply enjoying their own little world. Each sculpture had its own personality and its own story, and by December I had created the collection I had once only imagined.
Seeing all twenty pieces together in the gallery was something I will never forget.
But one of my favourite moments came during the private exhibition when my dad was there.
Years earlier, when I was still a young artist, Dad had carried that infamous owl sculpture through the campus and all the way home for me. Now, all those years later, he was standing in a gallery surrounded by an entire collection of my ceramic sculptures.
Looking around at everything I had created, he joked to Frank that carrying that “damn owl” all those years ago had paid off after all.
It was one of those wonderfully full-circle moments.
The girl who had once spent her summer happily lost in Robin’s World had found her way back there again.
Only this time, other people were being invited into that world too.
Where Art Led Me Next
Fairies in the Garden ended up changing much more than my life as an artist.
After the exhibition, Frank called me into his office. He told me that the response to my work had been wonderful, but there was one recurring piece of feedback: people loved the sculptures, but not everyone could afford an original piece.
He encouraged me to think about developing a smaller collection that could eventually be sold through bespoke shops around Ireland, with support from the Enterprise Board and the Crafts Council of Ireland.
Around the same time, Frank told me that his neighbour, who owned Capital Mouldings, was looking for an artist to assist with the recreation of old Georgian and Adam-style mouldings.
And that opportunity unexpectedly led me to Tim.
Tim was an artist too and had also exhibited his work through Frank’s gallery, although we had never actually met there. He was working for Capital Mouldings as a mould maker and artist when a broken knee temporarily took him out of work.
When I arrived to begin the job, Tim was the person who trained me.
By the end of that first week, we had fallen in love.
More than twenty years later, he is still my life partner.
Our time at Capital Mouldings only lasted a few months, but creatively, our paths had become intertwined. Years later, that combination of my work with clay and children and Tim’s knowledge of mould making would eventually grow into something neither of us could have imagined when we first met.
Clay Fun Art Studio
That creative partnership would eventually become Clay Fun Art Studio.
Clay Fun gave Tim and me a way to earn an income through creativity while still allowing each of us the space to develop and create our own work.
For me, much of that meant working with children—teaching them how to work with clay, encouraging their creativity and running art classes and birthday parties.
After Tim’s stroke and the changes that came with the Covid lockdowns, we eventually decided to step away from running Clay Fun as a business. The studio itself, however, never disappeared from our lives. I still teach there from time to time when the opportunity arises.
And throughout those years, my own relationship with clay continued to evolve.
When My Art Had to Change
In 2016, my relationship with clay changed again—but this time, not by choice.
I broke both my wrist and my humerus, and I was told there was a possibility that I might never sculpt in the same way again.
For someone whose hands had always been such an important part of how I expressed myself, that was difficult to hear.
But I wasn’t ready to walk away from clay.
Instead, I began finding different ways to work with it.
Rather than creating the larger, three-dimensional sculptures I had been accustomed to making, I began working with ceramic relief tiles. They allowed me to build imagery into the surface of the clay while gradually adapting to what my body could manage.
And something unexpected happened.
The change in the way I worked also began to change what I created.
My inner and spiritual experiences increasingly started appearing in the clay—dragons, maidens, crystals, meditation, light, celestial imagery and the other worlds I was beginning to experience within my own journey.
The tiles became more than a way of continuing to create after an injury.
They became a new visual language for me—a way of giving form to experiences that weren’t always easy to put into words.
When the Trees Came to Life
Even as my artwork began reflecting more of my inner and spiritual world, I never lost my love of creating pieces that were playful, earthy and a little magical.
One Christmas, Tim and I decided that instead of simply buying presents for one another, we would each make something.
My present for Tim became Jeff.
Jeff was a life-sized tree person, sculpted in clay and designed especially for Tim. I incorporated a lamp into him and even created a place where Tim could leave his phone beside his side of the bed.
What began as a very personal Christmas present sparked another direction in my work.
Before long, another life-sized tree person emerged—Stanley—along with several smaller tree-inspired planters.
There was something I loved about bringing the trees to life in clay. Their roots, bark, faces and individual personalities allowed me to combine my love of the natural world with the whimsical imagination that had been present in my work since Fairies in the Garden.
Once again, I found myself doing what had always come most naturally to me:
taking something I could see in my imagination and giving it a life of its own in clay.
When Art and Spiritual Practice Began to Meet
As my own spiritual journey continued to deepen, the things I was experiencing inwardly began finding their way more consciously into my artwork.
I had been working with crystals and crystal grids within my personal practice, and over time I began exploring how I could bring some of those elements into the pieces I created with my hands.
Then one night, I had a dream that led me to create something specifically for myself.
I created my Sacred Geometric Lamp, bringing together clay, sacred geometry and crystals in a piece that wasn’t intended for an exhibition or for someone else. It was created for me and for the spiritual work that was becoming such an important part of my life.
The lamp has remained with me ever since and has continued to evolve in how I use it. Today, it is the lamp I use for crystal gazing.
Around this same period, my exploration of crystal grids also became another way for me to combine creativity with spiritual practice—arranging crystals with intention and sacred geometric forms in ways that felt like a natural extension of what I was already expressing through clay.
For me, the boundary between art and spiritual practice was beginning to disappear.
They were becoming different expressions of the same inner world.
Giving an Experience Form — The Hill of Tara Well
By 2019, my artwork and my spiritual journey had become increasingly intertwined.
That year, I became involved in The Andara Project, which led me on an extraordinary journey to the Hill of Tara with two small Andaras I had come to know as Lady and Nada.
What unfolded there became one of the most meaningful experiences of my spiritual journey.
Over two days, together with my friends Michelle and Tonia and the unexpected help of Niall and Geraldine, I explored the land searching for a particular well where I felt Lady was meant to be placed.
Eventually, we found it.
The well had been dry for years. We spent hours clearing and tending the area before holding a ceremony and placing Lady within the well. From my perspective, what followed was extraordinary: water began to appear, and we were later told that the well was flowing again.
But there was so much more to my experience at Tara than the well itself.
I experienced the landscape as profoundly alive. The trees, the water and the beings I perceived there became part of a multidimensional world that was very real within my experience. Among them was a little Tuatha Dé Danann fairy I came to know as Oliver, whom I perceived as a gatekeeper of the well.
When I returned home, I wanted to give physical form to what I had experienced.
So I turned to clay.
I created my Hill of Tara Well Sculpture, bringing together the well, the flowing water, the trees and the beings I had encountered during those days at Tara.
It wasn’t an attempt to recreate the landscape exactly as it appeared physically.
It was my way of sculpting how I experienced it.
The sculpture still sits in my office today—a tangible reminder of those two extraordinary days and of the way clay has allowed me to give form to experiences that words alone could never fully capture.
When Art Became Part of the Practice
As my spiritual practice continued to evolve, so did the way I worked with clay, crystals and sacred geometry.
Eventually, I felt guided to create three pieces unlike anything I had made before: Sacred Geometric Orgone Energy Devices.
Each began with a ceramic base that I designed and sculpted around a particular sacred geometric form: the Dragon Power Symbol, the Tree of Life and Metatron’s Cube.
But the ceramic work was only one part of each piece.
I also created the individual orgonite components myself, combining resin, crystals, metals and other materials in different shapes and compositions. I was intuitively led towards particular recipes, forms and positions for each component within its corresponding ceramic grid.
The result was three very different mixed-media pieces, each created with its own purpose and accompanying practice.
The Dragon Power Energy Device was created alongside my Dragon Egg Releasing Core Wound Procedure.
The Tree of Life Energy Device accompanied my Unlock Your Heart Procedure.
And the Metatron’s Cube Energy Device accompanied my Activate Merkaba Procedure.
These pieces represented another shift in my relationship with art.
I was no longer only creating something that represented a spiritual experience, as I had with the Hill of Tara sculpture. I was creating artwork that I could actually use as part of my own spiritual practice.
Clay, crystals, sacred geometry and my intuitive work had finally come together within the same pieces.
And perhaps that is what my artwork has always been doing—changing as I change, while giving me a way to bring a little of my inner world into physical form.
Robin’s World Today
Looking back, I can see that my artwork has never really followed a straight line.
It has moved from fairies and tree people to light-coded tiles, sacred geometry, crystals and multidimensional sculpture. Some pieces have come from my imagination, others from dreams or lived spiritual experiences, and some simply began with the feeling that there was something waiting within the clay to emerge.
But the part that has remained constant is the feeling I discovered all those years ago when I first put my hands into clay.
I feel at home there.
Today, I continue to create intuitively, allowing each piece to develop in its own way rather than limiting myself to one particular style or collection.
I am also open to commissions for those who feel drawn to having something created especially for them. Because my work is personal and individually made, commissions begin with a conversation about the piece, its meaning and what you are hoping to bring into physical form.
For those who have connected with my light-coded ceramic tiles, I have also created a limited-edition collection in miniature, pocket-sized versions. These offer a smaller way to own and carry a piece inspired by the original artwork.
After all these years, I still think of my creative space in much the same way I did when I was young.
It is Robin’s World—a place where imagination, earth, spirit and a little bit of magic are allowed to meet.
And sometimes, something from that world finds its way into clay.
Interested in My Artwork?
If you would like to enquire about a commission, a miniature light-coded tile, or another piece of my artwork, you are welcome to get in touch using the form below.
No payment or commitment is required to make an enquiry.