Irish Sculpture of the 2000s

Sam Keogh, Monument for Subjects to Come, 2011, wood, expanding polyurethane foam, polystyrene, acrylic medium powdered mica, glitter, earth, laminated wrapping paper, sellotape, rope, sponge & duct tape, 322 × 153 × 480 cm; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Isabel Nolan, The Provisory Rug adapted and documented for past, present and future, 2012, set of 6 black and white photographs, AP18 × 27 cm each; courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery

Gracelands: Circling the Square, 2012, EVA International; courtesy of Vaari Claffey

about public art. How the image of a young track-suited girl from Ballymun riding bareback astride a mount originally created for a viscount could become the focus of such national debate exposed the underpinning of this regeneration process as primarily an ideological one, and one that was operating primarily through the space of representation. In the contested history of public monuments in Ireland, we appear to be challenged when that representational space is occupied by anything other than rich rockstars, martyred revolutionaries, or (if you happen to be female) virtuous Mother Irelands or busty fish sellers. Perhaps in an age of historical revisionism – where the only individual with enough courage to tackle the imbecilic and dangerous advances of the western hemisphere’s most vitriolic rulers is the unlikely character of a seventeen year old schoolgirl from Sweden – its placement will be reconsidered and Misneach may yet find its rightful place in the heart of Ballymun. At least I hope so. Megs Morley Turning Point (2010) Isabel Nolan IN THE SUMMER of 2008, I, along with Patrick Murphy and Vincent Honoré, was kindly invited by Clíodhna Shaffrey and Ruairí Ó Cuiv, to nominate three artists for consideration for a major commission they were managing for the yet to be built Terminal 2, at Dublin Airport. This was a challenging curatorial proposition as, given the context and scope of the commission, the artists’ brief was particularly demanding.

One of the three artists I proposed was Isabel Nolan for her beautiful, deceptively delicate, sculptural work, with its recognisable and defiant ‘hand-madedness’. Isabel’s deftness with materials and with shape, and the absolute clarity of the presentation of each finished piece, struck me as being acutely assured for such a young artist. Also, the genial, ludic element to her practice beguiled me. What might she – with her incomparable sense of colour, and her ability to manipulate form and space – make, if she were to work on a large-scale project? Against significant international competition, Isabel was unanimously awarded the commission.

Encountering Turning Point now causes a spin of excitement in me. That a work of art can have such a somatic effect on me is warmly received. The seemingly gravity-defying work, which Isabel spent two years making, is fluid and graceful, static yet imbued with a sense of movement which tricks the eye. Turning Point appears to twirl and rotate as you move up the escalator or simply walk past it. And as you see it, or indeed watch it, it changes, and re-frames what you see through it. It’s mesmerising, and as I travel less and less, I miss these thrilling encounters.

It takes great courage to make a piece of art for a public place, especially for one of such national importance. However, Isabel Nolan’s Turning Point has exceeded expectations and has surely become a beloved contemporary national icon. Aisling Prior Monument for Subjects to Come (2011) Sam Keogh AMONGST THE ARRAY of works exhibited at O’Connell Street, Limerick, as part of EVA International 2012, Sam Keogh’s Monument for Subjects to Come (2011) stopped me in my tracks. This ominous, overpowering monolith looms over the spectator, bearing down on them with its imposing heft, shimmering surface, and the sheer mystery of its meaning. It is simultaneously ancient and alien, embedded with powdered mica and glitter and plant life, wrapped in rope and folded fabric, and tethered to a makeshift wooden ‘palanquin’, a platform ready to be carried aloft through some unknown religious procession.

Keogh’s sculpture is uncannily attuned to the biennial’s title and theme of ‘After the Future’, curated by Annie Fletcher and named after Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s book. Monument for Subjects to Come amalgamates earth and soil with polyurethane foam and sellotape, and, in the process, infers the rituals and reliquaries of a future civilization, where geology and industry, natural elements and man-made waste, are so deeply enmeshed that one can no longer distinguish between the two. That this speculative distant society feels both so removed from our era and yet strangely familiar is an unsettling indication of how far along this trajectory we’ve already travelled. Chris Clarke Gracelands: Circling the Square (2012) EVA International 2012 GRACELANDS WAS AN outdoor happening devised and curated by Vaari Claffey, which presented Irish and international artists, working across a range of disciplines. The annual event (which ran from 2008 to 2011) usually took place over the course of one day and night on the grounds of the Mimetic House – the home of artists Grace Weir and Joe Walker, in Dromahair, County Leitrim. On 2 August 2012, ‘Gracelands: Circling the Square’ was presented at the Milk Market in Limerick, as part of EVA International 2012. The site-specific programme comprised a series of performance installations, sculptural installations and a screening programme. Over the course of the evening, the commercial site was transformed

Clodagh Emoe, An Exercise in Seeing, 2013, site-specific participatory artwork, Redcross Forest Co. Wicklow; photograph by Enda Dorran, courtesy of the artist

into a temporary exhibition – part sculptural installation, part theatrical arena. Responding to the canopy which covers the Milk Market, a number of fabric-based sculptural works were displayed, while other works incorporated performative aspects. The event considered the ‘square’ as a central meeting point – the site of social exchange, civic and political gathering – as well as a platform for the display of produce, artefacts and effects. It considered the process of circling as a kind of ‘uncertain or preparatory gathering’, with the site itself becoming a performative and kinetic sculpture. Joanne Laws The Provisory Rug, adaptable for past, present and future (For Marie Lieb) (2012) Isabel Nolan INSPIRED BY THE distinctive mark-making of a woman at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg in 1894, Isabel Nolan’s The Provisory Rug, adaptable for past, present and future (For Marie Lieb), celebrates the disarming nature of a stubbornly partial object, one that demands attention, alters perception, and reaches for meaning beyond what is known. The work was originally commissioned by Vaari Claffey for Gracelands: Circling the Square, as part of EVA International, in 2012. It takes the physical form of 144 individual steel rods (each measuring between 4 cm - 190 cm) enclosed and handsewn into lightly padded, variously patterned fabric. These components are accompanied by meticulous installation instructions for a range of geometric reconfigurations, with each variation dedicated to someone or something. I first encountered the work at Kerlin Gallery, where I was tasked with helping to set it up for photographic documentation. The first time I picked up one of the deceptively heavy steel pieces, I fell in love with it. Since then I have shown the work as a year-long durational sculpture, in four of its potentially infinite reconfigurations, during my first year as artistic director at Grazer Kunstverein. Of all the works I have known and loved, this one stands out as offering one of the most powerful and effective ways of re-arranging space, and re-ordering fragments in order to make sense of a whole. This desire for material agency was, I am sure, something Marie Lieb was reaching towards as she laid out torn strips of bedlinen across her bedroom floor in that hospital in Heidelberg in the 1890s. For her, the question must have been not how can she make art, but how can she not? Kate Strain The Forgotten Works (2012) Ruth E. Lyons COMPRISING OVER 500 bitumen-coated timber struts – screwed together to resemble a hastily built nest or a giant’s game of pick up sticks – The Forgotten Works was a largescale, temporary sculptural installation that made a brief but ecstatic appearance on the balcony of Project Arts Centre in the summer of 2012. Starting life as a drawing – a scribble of matted black marks, menacingly poised between two buildings – it was spotted in the artist’s studio by the then curator of visual arts, Tessa Giblin, who commissioned a reallife realisation of the sketch. Lyons, who is undaunted by the impossibility of things, constructed the sculpture over a number of weeks in full view of the passers-by on the streets below. Even upon completion, the work looked precarious, unstable, risky – a dark hulking clatter of matter, set to engulf the building from which it so suddenly seemed to emerge. Bitumen, a black sticky tar-like substance and the lowest residue of oil, was used to coat each 16ft length of wood used in the sculptural composition. This material, ordinarily used to bind together the surfaces of our streets, held a fascination for the artist, who was interested in thinking about fossil fuels as layers and layers of compressed time, condensed over millennia, to become energy. Thinking like this, in huge spans of time, is something that distinguishes Lyons’ work as an artist who is unafraid to reach into the deep past and think into the far future, exploring what a person, work or idea can be capable of, in the face of unstoppable processes. Kate Strain An Exercise in Seeing (2013) Clodagh Emoe FUNDED BY WICKLOW County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland, An Exercise in Seeing is a work developed and enacted within the curatorial project, ‘I Won’t Say That I’ll See You Tomorrow’ – a series of events and exhibitions centred on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Clodagh Emoe responded to the writings of Wittgenstein, who talks about society and the limits of language, our perception of objects and how we imagine objects in an art context. Belief and mysticism form the basis of this project. The public were invited to engage with and encounter her work in a forest and this was an innovative and surprising piece to find in this context. Emoe is an influential artist who has been widely recognised for her videos, sculpture and event-based projects. She was shortlisted for the David and Yuko Juna Award in 2019. Aoife Tunney

Sean Lynch, A blow by blow account of stonecarving in Oxford, 2013–14, installation view, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; courtesy the artist, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Ronchini Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and the Hugh Lane

Sven Anderson, Continuous Drift, 2015, public sound installation; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

Cliona Harmey, Dublin Ships, 2015, custom LED screen displays, networked computer with software linked to API, AIS antenna, network box; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist

Aideen Barry, Brittlefield, 2016, installation view, RHA Gallery; courtesy of the artist

John Gerard, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, simulation, dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Pace Gallery, New York

space, Exchange Dublin, due to complaints about ‘anti-social behaviour’. For many, this closure demonstrated the removal of independent cultural spaces in Temple Bar specifically and in Dublin more generally. What kind of shared culture is left and what kinds of compromises have to be employed to produce it? Anderson’s installation and the broader project it emerged out of (his proposal to act as an acoustic urban planner and sound designer for Dublin city) seems to be an exercise in tactics for producing these shared acoustic spaces. Rachel O’Dwyer Temple (2015) David Best CALIFORNIAN ARTIST DAVID Best was commissioned to produce an extraordinary temporary public sculpture in Derry that was ceremonially set alight on 21 March 2015. Best garnered an international reputation for his temples, which he had been building (and subsequently burning) at Burning Man Festivals in the Nevada Desert since 2000. The first temple was created to commemorate the death of a friend, who died on his way to the festival. In the years that followed, the temples became more elaborate but retained the spirit of healing and remembrance that inspired the original.

Best was invited by Artichoke to create his first major international work – a temple in the city of Derry that would bring together people from all communities to build this cathartic monument to forgiveness. A bonfire of a different sort. The site at Corrody Road Country Park, known locally as Kelly’s Field, certainly wasn’t a neutral space, although it became one for the duration of the project. Artichoke received significant funding from project partners including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and raised £30,000 through Kickstarter to meet their funding goals. The Kickstarter campaign (and its 629 backers) was symbolic of the participatory nature of the project, in which the 21 American crew members were joined by 98 local volunteers to create the sculpture. 40 local apprentices were trained, and 60,000 people visited the sculpture during the week it was open. 15,000 people attended the burning ceremony, which saw the temple and the thousands of messages left inside slowly disappear. Rob Hilken A blow-by-blow account of stone carving in Oxford (2013–14) Sean Lynch A BLOW-BY-BLOW account of stone carving in Oxford (2013–14) by Sean Lynch is at once an installation comprising sculptural elements, photographs and a narrated slide projection, and a reflection on the historical, social and spatial facets of sculpture. The work arises from the artist’s research into the nineteenth-century stone-carvers, John and James O’Shea, who were renowned for their naturalistic representations of animals and plants. After completing a series of notable carvings in Dublin in the 1850s (such as The Museum Building at Trinity College), they moved to Oxford to work on the new Museum of Natural History. Controversy surrounded their carvings of monkeys on the building’s façade, with claims that they represented Darwin’s theory of evolution, then the subject of vigorous debate. The resulting quarrel led to James O’Shea’s attempt to carve a series of caricatures of Oxford authorities as parrots and owls.

Lynch’s installation revisits this story through a deft combination of the material and the historical. A carving of a monkey, completed by Stephen Burke following the style and ethos of the O’Sheas, sits atop a hefty table resembling those used by sculptors to support blocks of stone during carving. Nearby, a pile of rubble and six black and white photographs document the process of the monkey’s creation. A slide projection, narrated by Gina Moxley, reflects on the legacy of the O’Sheas in Dublin, Oxford and beyond. Lynch’s recrafting of the story moves beyond the facts and explores the interplay between patronage, authenticity, the outsider, science, art, institutional values and the museum… a story staged in the 19th century but with enduring repercussions and relevance.

The work was shown in 2013 as part of the ‘Sleepwalkers’ programme at Hugh Lane Gallery, where it has since joined the collection (so I must confess an interest in nominating this work). It travelled to Modern Art Oxford the following year, connecting the two cities, just as the story of the O’Sheas as retold by Lynch connects 19th and 21st century sculptural practice. Logan Sisley Continuous Drift (2015) Sven Anderson

Dublin Ships (2015) Cliona Harmey DUBLIN SHIPS WAS a temporary public artwork, commissioned by Dublin City Council in a partnership with Dublin Port as part of the Dublin City Public Art Programme. On the one hand, it was a technologically complex sculptural work that pushed boundaries in its application of live electronic information system (an Automatic Identification System) tracking ships entering and leaving Dublin Port. On the other, it is a strikingly simple artwork, where the tracked ships were named (as they entered and departed), on two giant LED screens, installed on the Scherzer Bridges beside the Samuel Beckett Bridge. Muscular and poetic, present and spatial, the ships’ names read as pure poetry – Ulysses, Celtic Mist, Aurora, Bro Deliverer, South Highway, Lemonia – shaping a bold and rhythmic arrangement of names on screen, conjuring ideas of geographies and distance, commerce and trade, sea and horizon. A fantasy of ships tales mingling with the realities of an island nation, so utterly interdependent on an external world – bringing, leaving, consumption, waste, the essential reliance on others and elsewhere. Lasting nine months, Dublin Ships brought Dublin Port into view for a time. Clíodhna Shaffrey Brittlefield (2016) Aideen Barry IT’S SUMMERTIME, YET we find ourselves plunged into darkness in the voluminous main gallery at the RHA. Flickering screens of domestic turmoil greet us; in those enigmatic films there is a humour, a dark humour, but we find ourselves smirking. Beyond, rises up nine shards, piercing the very floor on which we walk, repelling yet attracting the viewer. Approaching these shards, we are aware of oval apertures on the side of each and a gentle flickering, beguiling CONTINUOUS DRIFT IS a sound installation integrated into Meeting House Square in Dublin. Initiated in 2015, the long-term artwork is designed and curated by Sven Anderson within ‘Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP)’, a public art project commissioned by Dublin City Council. The installation acts as a framework for various sonic atmospheres that can be activated by members of the public via mobile devices, to be played back from eight loudspeakers integrated into the four retractable panels that cover the square.

Existing compositions and site-specific commissions make use of mono, stereo and quadrophonic arrangements. Among these are Peter Cusack’s glacial recordings from the heartland of Siberia and Cristina Kubisch’s electromagnetic soundscapes. More locally, Danny McCarthy’s contribution features field recordings made when the neighbouring Crown Alley functioned as a telephone exchange, resurrecting the lost soundmarks of a vanished Temple Bar.

Meeting House Square was designed in 1991 by Temple Bar Properties as part of the regeneration project that transformed the area into a touristic and cultural quarter. It is named after the former Presbyterian and Quaker meeting houses that once flanked the space. The acoustic design of the meeting house manifested Quaker notions of egalitarianism; spaces were designed to amplify voices originating from anywhere in the building. Continuous Drift explores the soundscapes of contemporary Dublin, but it also asks who owns and controls these public spaces. Who has the right to broadcast and who has the right to occupy them, sonically or otherwise? Distinctions between what is acceptable sound and what is noise, between who gets to speak and who must only listen, are key.

From its parasitic relationship to existing infrastructures, Continuous Drift acts within the limits of what can happen in public in what is now, essentially, a private space in the heart of the city. The installation emerged just months after Dublin City Council’s closure of the cooperatively run arts