Visual Artists' News Sheet | Special Issue: March – April 2020
Four Decades of Irish Sculpture
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mark artistic response to the official resolution of conflict in the north of Ireland, originally commissioned by London’s Beaconsfield gallery – can be read in each of these contrasting ways. It is a work of monumental scale and style: the entire 11,500-word text of the negotiated settlement mechanically inscribed onto fifty-five four-foot-wide polyurethane panels. Massive, and imposing, it gives the appearance of solidity and permanence, resembling an elaborate public memorial, intricately detailed with unchanging, authoritative declarations. As such, it appears to mark the solemnity of an historical milestone with ambition, grandeur and certainty. And yet, this is an ‘uncertain’ sculpture too: made from relatively lightweight material, it is mobile and potentially impermanent. It is not set in stone. Rather than a grounding, durable form, it is a precarious maquette, a promise of a monument-to-come. Cullen’s sculpture, variously staged in Belfast, Derry, Dublin, London and Portadown during the early, anxious, post-Troubles years, is an ambiguous construct: a shifting, unsettled, ‘open’ form, that also, at an important point in Ireland’s recent history, pointed towards the hoped-for potential of closure. Declan Long More Than Anything (2004) Maud Cotter A MODULAR STRUCTURE of variable dimensions made
from 1.5mm birch plywood, More Than Anything embodies many of the themes that continue to preoccupy Cork-based sculptor, Maud Cotter. Cotter has worked consistently with materials that allow her to provoke awareness of such interfaces as mind and matter, interior and exterior, individual and collective, macro and micro. The work was installed in different guises in the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast (2004), Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2005), VISUAL, Carlow (2009) and, later, The Lab, San Francisco (2011). Where one iteration appeared to overwhelm the existing infrastructure and evoke architectonic form, another slowly encroached and divided spaces. The basic units from which each is made are lightweight, yet strong, and mirror the cellular makeup of the body. Also reminiscent of spinal structures, they convey resilience rather than vulnerability. The crosses formed where planar elements connect allow light and air to penetrate, while the repetition of this motif and its scaled-up explorations of horizontality and verticality invite comparison to the Modernist grid. At the art-craft juncture, the work’s systematic construction recalls the woven textile, an ancient technology bound up with cohesion and unity. However, a lack of rigid regularity breaks rank with this analogy and suggests propagation and growth. Susan Campbell Zip (2004) Corban Walker
CORBAN WALKER WAS commissioned by Aisling Prior for
Breaking Ground – the Ballymun Regeneration Per Cent for Art programme – to create a site-specific work for the interior atrium of the Civic Centre in Ballymun. Responding to the vast proportions of the space, Walker created a sculptural piece for one of the corners, comprising interlacing green and blue LED lights. With meticulous geometric precision, Zip appears to weave together the two perpendicular walls. This work attests to the philosophies of architecture and scale, recurrent in Walker’s wider practice, which often involves the creation of free-standing geometric configurations or minimalist glass stacks. Installed high on the wall, viewers must experience Zip from floor level, while looking upward. This spectator position highlights the ways in which Walker, the son of an architect, seeks to consider the pedestrian experience within the built environment. Joanne Laws A Pampootie
FOR MANY REASONS I found it impossible to choose a
favourite piece of contemporary Irish sculpture, but an unexpected alternative quickly came to mind – a pampootie from the Aran Islands. When I began to wonder why, the reasons became clear. First, I recalled that one had been included in ‘A Dream of Discipline’ (2006), a show by Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, and William McKeown at the Douglas Hyde
Napier & Hogg, The Soft Estate, 2006; photograph by Peter Richards, courtesy of the artists and Golden Thread Gallery
Gallery, and that an image of the same shoe had appeared in an earlier gallery publication called The Paradise (2002). The pampootie had accrued some sculptural or ‘artistic’ qualities by osmosis. More significantly though, I’ve always found the shape of pointed-toe pampooties graceful and beautiful, almost otherworldly, as though they were worn by fairy folk. Their real social origins, of course, were far more down-to-earth. Made from single pieces of untreated hide with the hair left on, held together by leather laces or twine, pampooties were used as everyday footwear by Aran fishermen, who had to keep them moist in order to retain their suppleness. They were not expected to last very long. It is said that J.S. Synge insisted on the use of real pampooties in his productions of his Aran Islands play, Riders to the Sea, because their pre-modern ‘authenticity’ was crucial to one of its themes, the tension between tradition and contemporary life. This natural ‘authenticity’, however romanticised, as well as their sense of functional agility, helps to account for much of my liking for them. At the same time, however, they are inextricably linked in my mind with artists like Kathy Prendergast, Dorothy Cross, and Aleana Egan, because their work frequently references, or is made from, natural materials and vernacular objects. I find it endlessly fascinating to see how the meanings of ideas and things keep shifting and developing according to their contexts and connections. John Hutchinson
Tim Shaw, Parliament, 2006, black polythene, wire and straw; photograph by and courtesy of the artist
The Soft Estate (2006) Napier & Hogg (Philip Napier & Mike Hogg) THE SOFT ESTATE comprised a constellation of various and changeable sculptural units, orbiting around a series of dining tables. The tables functioned as specially constructed negotiating tables, whilst the accompanying units explored forms of measure and a revised language of assigned common attributes. Initially the first of the tables appeared as a sturdy extending dining table. The table, beautifully manufactured, by Gilbert Logan and Sons, was actually a facsimile of a table originally destined for the ill-fated Titanic that now resides on public display in the Custom House, Belfast. Strategically presented in a de-familiarised state, and fully lengthened with its engineered mechanism exposed by the deliberate omission of its central panels, the work invited considered reflection and discussion. The second table existed in a bastardised state, prone to fail under its own weight, as a precarious assemblage. It stood vastly over-stretched and provisionally shored up to prevent
Seamus Nolan, Hotel Ballynum, 2007, furniture from Room 2; courtesy of the artist
