8 minute read
BREAKING THE MOULD
from RCSI Alumni Magazine 2023
by RCSI
Two nursing pioneers are the first females to be represented in the RCSI Portrait Sculpture Collection. Antonia Hart meets the artist, John Rainey.
Pioneers in nursing and midwifery have become the first two women to be represented in the RCSI Portrait Sculpture Collection. Busts of Elizabeth O’Farrell and Florence Nightingale, commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery’s Research and Education Conference, have just been installed and unveiled in the RCSI Atrium.
Both subjects had multiple layers of interests and activity. O’Farrell was a nurse and midwife, trained in the National Maternity Hospital, but also a member of Cumann na mBan, the Gaelic League, and the Irish Women’s Franchise League. Nightingale, best known for her stint nursing during the Crimean war, and as founder of the nurses’ training school at St Thomas’s Hospital, was also a statistician, the first woman member of the Royal Statistical Society, and an early advocate of the right to healthcare. The three core values of Irish nursing and midwifery are compassion, care, and commitment, and early on John Rainey, the sculptor chosen to complete this commission, decided to echo these values visually by using three different marbles. The portraits are sculpted from Carrara marble, with dark grey Kilkenny marble bases, and midsections of green Connemara marble. He sourced the Connemara marble from a quarry in Recess, Co Galway. “The Connemara marble is a very striking, beautiful stone that has mythical associations with wellbeing and health. While these associations may have more to do with ancient mysticism than modern medicine, they speak to a heritage of healing, and to the way people, over time, have sought to improve health.”
While the process of shaping and finishing a sculpture in stone can be done entirely by hand, it has also benefited from technological advances. Rainey first created digital sculptures of O’Farrell and Nightingale in CAD software. “Then it’s carved by Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) robots, using a sequence of increasingly fine drill bits. The three sections of marble in each piece were then secured together and finished by hand.” It took about three months to complete the physical production of the portraits. “I’ve worked a lot with 3D printing technology since 2010 but this commission allowed me to start working with CNC technology, and marble as a material, for the first time.”
Digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing and scanning have also transformed processes in the medical world, but just as in the art world, any meaningful application requires human knowledge and experience. Technology provides tools, but it is Rainey’s years of material experience and skill that lends substance to the work and brings out the best in the stone.
John Rainey was born in 1985 and grew up in Omagh. As a child he was drawn to creativity, hooked on model making, and dismantling toys to figure out how they were put together. He describes his route through art education, a primary degree in Contemporary Crafts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, as being materials-led, with ceramics his medium of choice.
“I’m inspired by many art forms, from painting and collage, to animation, but there’s something about the way sculpture occupies space and sits within our world that really fuels my imagination.” This idea of the space a sculptural piece requisitions, and its physical coexistence with us, makes huge sense when you see the two busts in the Atrium. Rainey suggests that the bust form requires the viewer to zone in on the most characteristic elements of the subject. At the same time, the pieces somehow incorporate a complete, rather than a partial, presence. “ There’s a way that a bust mounted on a plinth at the correct height takes on the presence of the full body. at works really effectively with the way we’ve installed these pieces.”
Rainey is used to making representations without direct access to a live subject. In his early work he made computer-generated portraits using online images, without direct interaction with the subject. “It was a way of thinking about the changing nature of human interaction with the advent of social networks, and the access to an abundance of images of people and their lives that was suddenly available on these platforms.”
This remote method of portrait-making resurfaced in RCSI’s commission. “I had the opposite of an abundance of images, particularly in the case of Elizabeth O’Farrell. I knew I would have to cast a wider net, bringing in paintings and existing sculptures, representations in popular culture, in film and television, as well as archival and literary records, and artistic licence. With Florence Nightingale, there’s such mythology around her, some conflicting. I had to read between the lines and try to learn about her objectively.” It’s not just a case of processing archival information into a literal, factual portrayal. “Really, the job is to weave the research into a sculptural storytelling that captures peoples’ imaginations.”
Details, or a single detail, can conjure that story. “With Nightingale, for example, it felt important to include the early form of nursing cap that she pioneered, as a symbol of the professionalism that she introduced into nursing.” In O’Farrell’s case, because available photographic records withheld certain details, Rainey delved into the world of early 20th-century Irish women’s hairstyles. Again, clothing carries meaning. “O’Farrell is represented with a hint of her professional uniform under a large overcoat, similarly to filmic depictions of her role in the Rising. There’s an androgynous quality to it, intended to echo RCSI’s full- figure sculpture of Countess Markievicz in uniform, and suggest the shared history of the two women.” The combination of uniform and outerwear reflects that both women contributed inside and outside their professions. The story everyone knows about O’Farrell is that she, with Pearse, delivered the surrender to General Lowe at the end of Easter Week, and she carried the surrender order to the Volunteer garrisons, including one situated at RCSI. A newspaper photograph recorded O’Farrell’s presence at the surrender, but in reproductions the visible parts of her were erased. It is particularly moving to see O’Farrell now portrayed in a material as durable as stone. “The permanence of marble and its associations with commemoration and worthiness were in my mind,” Rainey says. “There is something especially fitting about having her marble bust sited in the heart of RCSI.”
Rainey was twelve at the time of the Omagh bombing, months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It stamped in him an early respect for the work of medical staff. “One of the ways this commission has stayed with me is in a renewed appreciation and admiration for the people who worked in medical professions during that time. Particularly nurses who cared for victims over long periods of recovery.” The strangeness of seeing his home town and its trauma relayed through media across the world immediately after the bombing sparked questions about representation which inform his work today. “Fissures between reality and representation are a long-running theme in my work. People often connect my work to surrealism. I think some of those qualities originate from that experience.”
It is always striking when something familiar is represented in an unfamiliar or subverted way, or outside the expected context. “Something that excited me about this project was the representation of women in a format typically associated with representations of men. And the opportunity to contribute to redressing the gender imbalance of representations of historical figures in public collections; to intervene when history has been too selective.” Thanks to research by RCSI archivist Susan Leyden, members of O’Farrell’s family were at the unveiling. For Rainey, this was an unexpected highlight of the commission. “Her great-nephew Ian Kelly told me that he felt the portrait had a sense of Elizabeth ‘rising up’. That felt like such an important idea in the context of this commission, it seemed to encompass the histories of these women, the focus on the contributions of women, the vibrancy of the Faculty and School of Nursing and Midwifery and the tenacity of people working in those professions.” ■
Discover more fascinating detail about RCSI's Portrait Sculpture Collection https://youtu.be/7qbsLXs99DQ
