Roger Bennett is an Irish woodturner who makes distinctive coloured bowls and vessels. These are gracefully shaped, often surprisingly thin, and many of them are inlaid with hundreds of silver dots arranged in constellation-like clusters or formal geometric patterns.
He has also developed a complementary jewellery range – pendants, brooches, earrings, cufflinks. They are in the same idiom as his bowls, coloured wood inlaid with silver, and are wonderfully easy to wear, light and silkily sensuous.
Roger’s work has featured in numerous exhibitions in Ireland, Britain, France and the USA; he has shown at SOFA New York, SOFA Chicago, CraftBoston and Origin (London). He has been included in all the editions of the Irish Crafts Council’s Portfolio selection, from its inception in 2006 until the most recent one in 2021, and has twice won the woodturning award in the RDS National Crafts Competition.
In 2016 he was one of the original selections for the Michelangelo Foundation’s Homo Faber Guide.
In 2021 Roger was named an ‘Irish Craft Hero’, one of 50 makers selected from the period 1971-2021 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Design and Crafts Council Ireland: “makers whose work has significant legacy, has heralded new approaches or changed the way we look at the world”.
An outdoor touring exhibition and book (to which Roger contributed two essays) were launched as part of the celebrations.
Examples of his work feature in many public and private collections, including those of the National Museum of Ireland, the Ulster Museum, the OPW, and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.
He was a member of the Board of Visual Artists Ireland from 2005 to 2014. In 2021 he was invited to join the Advisory Panel of the Golden Fleece Award.
A former teacher, Roger has a degree in English and French from Trinity College Dublin. He is a graduate of the Crafts Council of Ireland's Craft and Design Business Development Course. Originally from County Laois, he lives and works in Dublin. He is married to the writer and publisher Siobhán Parkinson, Ireland’s inaugural Laureate na nÓg (Laureate for Children’s Literature).
Roger writes occasionally about craft – see ‘Articles and Essays by Roger’. He convenes the Dublin-based Craft Writers Group, whose members meet regularly to discuss topics related to craft and design and to share their writings.
Further reading
This Looks Interesting by Steve Forrest, American Woodturner, December 2023
Small Treasures by Kevin Wallace, American Woodturner, Summer 2007
Roger Bennett: Prizing Craft by Eleanor Flegg (Irish Arts Review Winter 2006)
Sometimes the wood reveals itself and surprises you - a profile of Roger Bennett by Ambrose O'Halloran (Turning Points Vol. 17 no. 4)
The Music of the Bowls by Belinda McKeown (Irish Times, June 2000)
Online interview
Interview with Deborah Blakeley for the Australian online arts paper ZoneOne Arts in February 2017: click here
"I love wood, the uniqueness of each piece, the history of the tree’s life preserved in the ring patterns and figuring. I delight in the daily interaction between maker and material, the magic of shaping, turning argument into conversation.
I dream of making a bowl as strong as an eggshell, as heavy as a whisper. Of capturing and fixing my favourite colours – mallard drake green, oil on water, midnight in midsummer, frosty night skies.
And with silver I can indulge my love of order, impose my markings on the wood’s surface, the natural flows and eddies of the grain complemented by my precise patterns of dots.
A completed bowl should satisfy all our senses. Line and form above all else, traced by eye and hand, from rim to base and all around. The smell of wood and oil. And whenever a bowl is right, it sings."