Shem Mackey: recreating the instruments of the past in his own way

When, as a young man, Shem Mackey walked into the early musical instruments workshop at the London College of Furniture to visit a friend, he “felt like I was ‘home’.”

Several decades later, it’s no surprise that Mackey is fully immersed in the craft he fell in love with back then. A respected maker of early musical instruments, a founder member of the British Violin Making Association, a published researcher in his field and a teacher at West Dean College: Shem Mackey’s dedication to his craft is a full time vocation. 

It all started back in his native Ireland where he grew up on a farm as part of a family that prized both music and woodworking. Making things was part of his childhood, while he also played the flute and whistle in local pubs. As an adult, it was perhaps inevitable that he would look for something that combined both those interests.

It was a friend who gave him the idea of making musical instruments, encouraging him to spend time at a community workshop in Beitenwiel, Switzerland in the early 1980s. He followed that with a degree in early musical instrument making at the London College of Furniture, specialising in the viola da gamba, or viol, an instrument which dates from the late 15th century. Tuition from some of the great London-based makers – Stephen Barber, Stephen Gottlieb, Norman Myall – gave him solid foundations for the future.

On graduating, he had enough commissions to open his own workshop, making viols in the way he was taught at college. However, some years later he became “disillusioned” with the methods he was using. “I began to look more closely at original work and, in a way, to ‘apprentice’ myself to these long-dead makers. There was a ‘softness’ to original work that was missing in our rigid, newly made, symmetrical instruments,” he says.

As a result, he developed his own system of making instruments without moulds, informed by the sparse evidence he had of original methods and the evidence provided by the centuries-old instruments themselves: very visible makers’ marks, tool marks and repeated “oddities”.

His research became the subject of his master’s degree at London Metropolitan University, and he has been using these methods ever since – methods now adopted by other makers, since they “enable us to unconsciously recreate the eccentricities and the asymmetry of original work”.

Despite this “full immersion” in authenticity (he is constantly researching and studying original pieces in museums), Mackey also adapts his craft to contemporary times. He uses ‘faux’ materials instead of real tortoiseshell and ivory, requiring a different approach to recreate the original ‘look’ of the instrument, and also uses his own decorative themes which, “though informed by history, are not copied from old instruments,” he says. “So I innovate through the medium of original technique.”

All this results in instruments that respect traditional techniques but are not “constrained by the past”. Instruments that deserve to be played. “I love the fact that when I have finished my work, [the instrument] is just beginning its life as a tool in the hands of another... the musician.”

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