Profiles

TOM CLIMENT OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HIS PAINTING PRACTICE AND HIS RECENT EXHIBITION AT CCI PARIS. After I left secondary school in 1987, I studied engineering for a few years. At the same time, I was doing night classes in painting at Crawford College of Art and Design with the late Jo Allen, who encouraged me greatly. I later studied at Crawford full-time and qualified with a Fine Art degree in 1995. I’ve been working as an artist since then, later returning to college and completing a Masters by Research in 2011.  Ten years ago, Solomon Fine Art in Dublin took me on as one of their artists. I’ve since had…

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS DAPHNE WRIGHT AHEAD OF HER SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM. Joanne Laws: We both studied in Sligo RTC (now Atlantic Technological University). I studied Fine Art in the late-90s, during an inspiring period for female Irish sculptors. Was there a sense of optimism at this time, or did momentum happen against the odds? Daphne Wright: Well, everybody left in the 80s – the recession was brutal. I left Ireland in 1989. In the 90s, I just remember going from fellowship to fellowship and residency to residency, in order to sustain my practice. I was a fellow in Cheltenham, a Henry Moore fellow in Manchester, and spent…

KATHRYN MAGUIRE OUTLINES HER LATEST RESIDENCY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN HER PRACTICE. I am a visual artist and educator whose practice incorporates socially engaged projects, environmental awareness projects, and public art projects. I create sculptural installations and interventions to explore ideas with communities and within the gallery space. A recurrent theme in my work focuses on voices of the silenced and the non-human, exploring how they might have agency in memory and history. Exploring geology, the history of materials, and the circular economy, my current work concentrates on lithics, minerals, and mining. I examine rocks and minerals from various international locations, through a situated, land-based practice. Increasingly, my work engages processes…

ELLA DE BÚRCA INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH COPE ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PAINTING PRACTICE.  Ella de Búrca: Could you open up on your early influences and what led you towards painting? Elizabeth Cope: As children, my father used to take us around to all the different monuments. We had some of our family buried in Killín Cormac in County Kildare. I remember seeing Ogham stones in the graveyard (that were later stolen) and you’d have to translate them into Latin. These kinds of things were inspiring to me. When I was nine, my sister Phil came home from Paris with a box of oil paints; it was the smell of those…

JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS EILIS O’CONNELL ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE OVER FIVE DECADES. Joanne Laws: Perhaps you could start by outlining the environment and appetite for sculptural practice in Ireland in the late 70s, as you graduated from Crawford School of Art and Design? Eilis O’Connell: There was a passion and intensity for sculpture in those days. I remember a show called ‘OASIS’ (Open Air Show of Irish Sculpture) and annual exhibitions like Living Art and Independent Artists. I first exhibited my work as part of The Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1972. Can you believe that I was so brazen, to put my work into a national…

MARGARET FITZGIBBON OUTLINES THE EVOLUTION OF HER PRACTICE.  I completed a BA in Sculpture at Crawford College of Art and Design in the 1980s. Soon afterwards, I joined the recently formed Cork Artist Collective (est. 1985) and became a director, serving until 2006. Not only did CAC provide me with a studio, but also the fellowship of other emerging artists.  During the 90s, I completed a range of public art works. For example, in 1997, I was commissioned to create a site-specific commission for University College Cork, Ten Foolish and Wise Virgins, comprising ten bronze and stone sculptures, sited in the foyer of the O’Rahilly Building. In 2008, I completed…

Brenda Moore-McCann: I am struck by the dynamism and ambition of your painting practice in dealing with difficult content that condenses contemporary political events through multiple perspectives. How and when did you decide to address issues of war and conflict in your work? Claire Halpin: Around 2008, I made the shift from using family photographs as source material in my paintings to newspaper photographs, particularly sites of conflict. I was drawn to media images that echoed the composition of biblical, Renaissance, and Byzantine painting. In 2010 I did a residency in Georgia where my training as an icon painter solidified this new direction in my work. I was visiting sites…

It is a rare and humbling thing to look up at the night sky, see a dazzling point of light silently wandering across it, and know that you have art there. On 19 February a two-stage Antares rocket launched from Wallops Island, Virginia, USA. This mission sent a spacecraft into low Earth orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). It was carrying crew supplies, experiments, vehicle hardware and an art gallery.  ‘Moon Gallery: Test flight’ features the work of 64 international artists, and the entire exhibition fits into a small 8 cm x 8 cm grid. It is curated by the Stichting Moon Gallery Foundation in Amsterdam. Our…

It’s the last Monday of July 2021. I am with seven others in the sunny garden of Campo dell’Altissimo Summer School in the tiny village of Azzano in Northern Italy. We are listening intently to the instructions of sculptor and experienced stone-carver, Sven Rünger. We are overlooked on almost every side by the Apuan Alps – the calcareous mountain range which, only yesterday, I tried to photograph from my aeroplane seat on the approach to Pisa.  Our (as yet untouched) marble stones originated up in those mountains somewhere. It has been explained to us that these stones are waste matter, washed down from the quarries which have been active in…