Hi there, I'm Maeve Bowen of Bo Design!

Hi, I’m Maeve Bowen — creator of Bo Design, professional ideas-person, and someone who moved to Kinsale for love - and somehow ended up building a little world around emotionally complicated animals.

Originally from Cork city, I now live on a dairy farm outside Kinsale after making the sort of life decision that sounds fictional when you say it too quickly: during Covid, I met a farmer. While the rest of the country was panic-buying flour and questioning their sanity indoors, we were trying to maintain a relationship involving checkpoints, weather forecasts and increasingly suspicious explanations to Gardaí. Romance, but with more wellies and weather warnings.

At the time, I had spent years working in the public service, dealing with communities and I was fascinated by the little things that connect us — local humour, shared experiences, familiar places.

Then (because I apparently view free time as a personal enemy), I decided to go back to college later in life and complete a PhD in Social Science focused on digital storytelling and communities. It may sound impressive until I admit a lot of it involved staring into the abyss of Microsoft Word at 2am wondering why I’d done this to myself. But the interesting thing about it was how important a sense of place is to us.

The PhD seemingly somehow was not enough and I continued to study graphic design and did a photography night course at Crawford Art College. All of this lay the path to starting Bo Design (I didn’t know this at the time).

At the time, I still considered myself a fairly sensible career person.

Then I moved to the countryside to be with himself.

And between the cows, the calves, the three dogs, the fox living on the road like he pays rent, the pheasants wandering around with enormous confidence, and the owls sounding vaguely haunted at night, something in my brain shifted slightly.

I started noticing personalities in all of them.

Not cute storybook personalities either. Proper Irish personalities.

The sheep looked like exhausted secondary school teachers near retirement. The cows had the energy of women who are one minor inconvenience away from sending a strongly worded email. The dogs looked permanently disappointed, like they’d arrived somewhere expecting better snacks. Foxes had the facial expressions of someone overhearing gossip in SuperValu. Even the pheasants were walking around like middle managers who’ve lost patience with the team.

What began as a few ideas slowly turned into prints, greeting cards, notebooks, coasters and framed pieces inspired by Irish life, rural characters and the tiny everyday absurdities we all recognise. The animals took over towns and hung around our favourite places, like Kinsale and Clonakilty. Places that are cornerstones of our community – the type of ‘places’ that make a community what it is.

The work is a combination of photography, artificial intelligence and graphic design. I found that I had accidentally created a world populated by animals like it was an entirely reasonable little business. Which, somehow, it has become.

The clay pieces came later after doing a ceramics night course (another one, I know), which started innocently enough and escalated quickly. I began making framed hearts, dresses, stars, waves and little handmade pieces that felt meaningful and personal — things that celebrate memories, people and places.

At the heart of Bo Design is probably just this: life is hard enough already. The world is full of bills, bad news, endless emails and trying to reverse down narrow Irish roads while pretending you definitely saw the ditch. I’d rather make things that feel warm, funny and familiar. Things that make people laugh unexpectedly, remind them of home, or create the deeply confusing experience of feeling “Why does that sheep look like she knows my secrets?”

If someone looks at my work and thinks, “That cow has exactly the same expression I had during my last Zoom meeting,” and that somehow makes you feel more emotionally understood, I feel like I’ve achieved something 😊

Thanks so much for visiting my little store!

Maeve Bowen