Mayo man to feature in national television documentary series tonight
Blacksmith John Hogan from Killala, takes on a project at Westport House in Co. Mayo.
Masters: Keepers of Tradition is a documentary series focusing on Irish practitioners of rare, traditional, and remarkable crafts and skills.
It is inspired by the iconic series Hands, which first aired on RTÉ in the late 70’s and gave us a powerful insight into the lives and work of Irish craftspeople. The goal of this series is to bring contemporary artisans back into the public consciousness, while also shedding light on the current state of the craft community in Ireland.
This landmark series, made with the support of The Heritage Council and Coimisiún na Meán, aims to champion local master craftpeople, showcase their skills and trades, and show how they have endured and diversified since the series Hands finished. It aims to inspire the next generation of makers to take up the mantle and keep these trades alive in the 21st century.
Each episode will focus on one Irish craftsperson and their craft. But more than delivering a one-dimensional demo of the work they do, we’ll also delve into the person they are, their motivations, the family and neighbours who influenced them, and, of course, their physical environs. In each episode, we will follow the creative process as our artisan takes on a local commission and witness how it affects them and the commissioner when it’s finished. We want our viewers to see that artisanal excellence doesn’t just happen in the abstract; it happens here and now, in the real world, and that their dedication, expertise, and passion enrich our society.
The six craftspeople are featured in the series, including blacksmith John Hogan from Killala, who takes on a project at Westport House in Co. Mayo.
John Hogan was never academic, but he knew from an early age that he understood how things worked. It was watching the iconic RTÉ series Hands that set his course – he enrolled in the blacksmith school founded by David Shaw Smith and never looked back.
In this episode, John takes on the most ambitious restoration of his career: a century-old ornate wrought-iron gates at Westport House, eaten by rust after decades of exposure to sea salt and Atlantic weather. Working from preserved original drawings, he strips the gates back to their bones – over a thousand individual pieces, sandblasted, catalogued, and mapped out across his workshop floor. To reconstruct them, he must first invent the tools to make the shapes the original maker used. It is, John notes, as if that maker had set out to demonstrate every technique in the blacksmith's repertoire.
Drawn deeper into the heritage of his craft, John learns to smelt iron ore from the bogs of Mayo from a fellow blacksmith Jamie Smith of Triscele Forge. Twenty months of painstaking work later, the gate goes back up, a testament to John’s exceptional skill and artistry as a blacksmith, and a heartfelt homage to the original maker, the master blacksmith Mr. William Maides of Haslemere. As his personal artistic contribution, John presents the owners with a beautifully crafted ceremonial key for the gates, forged from ancient local iron.
