The unveiling in April 2002 of a large bronze sculpture by Eilis O’Connell in the gardens of Lismore Castle marked a significant step in the revitalisation of this historic location, overlooking the River Blackwater in County Waterford. The sculpture, a unique casting entitled Under and Over IV, was specially commissioned for the site, a level stretch of lawn in the Lower Garden, close to the base of the Flag Tower. Although a number of other sculptures have already been placed in the gardens, notably Anthony Gormley’s Learning to Be I, this new work by O’Connell is the first site-specific work to be commissioned by the owners, family representatives, Lord and Lady Hartington. For years the castle has lain somewhat dormant, apart from occasional summer lettings and infrequent visits. However in recent years the Hartingtons, whose main residence is in Yorkshire, have quietly initiated a programme of renovations and improvements. Inside, archives are being sorted and catalogued, while outside, the renovation of features such as the circular lily pond and extensive new plantings by head gardener Chris Tull have attracted praise from visitors, who now number about 10,000 each year. By carefully positioning sculptures at key points through the Upper and the Lower Gardens, a new element has been added to the experience of visiting Lismore. It is a rare example in Ireland of private patronage of first-rate contemporary sculpture. A tall, somewhat professorial looking man in his late fifties, Lord Hartington is generous with his time in showing us around the gardens. He explains how the notion of the sculpture garden has evolved gradually over the past few years. The first sculptures to be placed in the gardens were relatively small works, by lesser-known artists. However, as the concept has taken root, recent sitings have been of a more substantial quality and international note.

Lord Hartington is not unfamiliar with first-rate art. Son of the Duke of Devonshire, he grew up at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, one of the outstanding great houses of England. “Living at Chatsworth meant that I grew up used to living with art. In addition to the historic works, such as paintings by Poussin, my father also acquired contemporary paintings by Lucian Freud and sculptures by Elizabeth Frink. My father has just acquired a work by Frink entitled Walking Madonna’. The gardens at Chatsworth contain sculptures, fountains by Cibber, and a full-scale ground plan, laid out as a parterre, of Chiswick House, for many years the London home of the Devonshires. Built in the 18th century by Lord Burlington, Chiswick, a Palladian villa, was the progenitor of the Georgian‚ style of architecture in Britain and Ireland. Burlington was also Earl of Cork and was a descendant of Richard Boyle, the Great Earl of Cork who lived at Lismore Castle in the early 17th century, and laid out the gardens more or less as they are seen today. Because of these family connections—a daughter of the Boyle family married into the Devonshires in 1775—Chiswick, Lismore and Chatsworth share significant historic, architectural and artistic links. The Book of Lismore, a 14th-century Irish manuscript containing an account of legendary hero Fionn MacCumhal, is preserved today at Chatsworth. It was discovered during renovations carried out in the castle in 1814. Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Devonshires, carried out extensive works both at Chatsworth and Lismore, and ranges of his greenhouses still survive at both houses. In 1852 Paxton designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition. The present appearance of Lismore Castle owes much to Paxton, while its Gothic interiors were designed by Augustus Welby Pugin. In contrast to Chatsworth, built on the edge of the Derbyshire moors, in what Daniel Defoe described in 1724 as a ‘houling wilderness’‚ Lismore Castle enjoys a dramatic situation in a mature and verdant valley of the River Blackwater. At Chatsworth, landscape architect Capability Brown was employed to render the gardens more picturesque by altering bends in the river and creating rolling parklands, obliterating earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean formal plantings. A century later, Paxton continued this work, moving huge boulders to create a picturesque cascade and creating the 1843 Emperor Fountain. While the skills of Brown and Paxton were essential at Chatsworth, Lismore needed little to improve it from a picturesque point of view. Perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the river, the castle enjoys one of the most dramatic locations of any building in these islands.

The gardens at Lismore amount to about seven acres and are divided into two different sections, each with its own distinct characteristics, by a central axis of the driveway leading from the Riding House (or gate lodge) to the main gate. The general form of the Upper Gardens at Lismore, laid out in two grand terraces and surrounded by bastions and a fortified wall, follows the original 17th-century pattern, a formal Jacobean garden, designed on a grid plan. Boyle’s diaries are preserved at Chatsworth, while his account books are in the National Library of Ireland. He recorded in 1626 payments for ‘compassing my orchard and garden at Lismore with a wall of two and a half feet thick and fourteen feet high of lyme and stone and two turrets at each corner.’ Two years later he constructed the terrace. ‘I paid Turlough and William May for diging, mowing and laying my terras at Lismore with paved, hewn stones.’1 The atmosphere of Lismore during the time of the Great Earl is perhaps best preserved in the avenue leading to the courtyard gate. Straddling the avenue, the Riding House, a neat edifice of three stories built around 1630 (perhaps on the remains of an earlier church) serves both as a gate lodge and as a connecting bridge‚ between the Lower and Upper Gardens. Access to the Upper Garden is gained via a wooden staircase inside the Riding House.

In discussing the contemporary sculptures now sited at Lismore, Lord Hartington stresses practical aspects such as durability and scale, but is more circumspect in discussing the theme, or inspiration, which has informed the overall development of the sculpture garden. Many of the works have been acquired from Roche Court in Salisbury, a commercial gallery and sculpture park, run by Madeleine Bessborough. ‘What we have here at Lismore are pieces we like. When we see them, in a gallery or at Roche Court, we think about practical things. We try to think where it would go. Sometimes we move them from one position to another. If you have to fuss about them, it’s no pleasure. You have to allow that sculptures in a garden will be subject to rainwater, autumn leaves and children. At our home in Yorkshire for instance, we have a sculpture by Richard Long, a long stone path made of individual pieces of stone. Each of the pieces can be moved. If we sited that here at Lismore, it would probably be interfered with. You don’t want to say “don’t touch that”. Children and even adults have to be allowed to touch the sculptures and not spoil the work of art.’ However, on reading even a cursory history of Lismore, it becomes clear that many of the sculptures may have been chosen by the Hartingtons, not solely for reasons of aesthetics or durability, but also for the way in which they resonate with the history of the site.

The gardens and castle pre-date the arrival of the Great Earl by over four hundred years. The first true castle, or castellum‚ at Lismore was built in 1185, on the site of the ruined abbey of
St Carthage, by Prince John, Earl of Moreton and brother of Richard, later King of England. Thirteen years earlier, their father Henry II had passed through Lismore on his way to Cashel, where the Irish hierarchy made their submission and recognised him as King of Ireland. Lismore was said to be the last of three castles Prince John built in Ireland during his short stay of eight months, and was an important element in the consolidation of Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. Four years after its erection it was surprised by the Irish, and the garrison, along with Robert de Barry, the governor, was put to the sword. An echo of these bloody battles may be found in the stone sculpture Warrior Head, by Emily Young, a sculptor who studied at St Martin’s School of Art and who lives and works in London. Looking west along the Central Walk, framed by herbaceous borders and yew hedges, the spire of Lismore Cathedral is visible in the distance. Directly below the spire, Warrior Head, placed on a solid rectangular plinth, marks the termination of the Walk. According to legend, Richard Boyle arrived in Ireland, aged 22 with just twenty-seven pounds in his pocket, a diamond ring, a bracelet and the clothes he wore. His determination to succeed was extraordinary, even by the standards of the era. In 1601, he made an epic dash from Cork to London, to be first with news of the defeat of the Spanish and Irish at Kinsale. Boyle’s leadership qualities were legendary. He established in Ireland ‘a colony of four or five hundred foot and sixty horse, all mere English, which live together in as civil and orderly a fashion as in any part of England’.2 He cannily used all the resources available to him in Ireland, presenting King James with gifts of goshawks and falcons from the Blasket Islands, and sending Irish wolfhounds to his friends in England.

Positioned in the Upper Garden, Hunting Bird, a bronze sculpture by Bridget McCrum, evokes a memory of the falconry the Great Earl established at Lismore. Placed asymmetrically beside the steps leading to the top terrace, Hunting Bird depicts a raptor in the act of swooping on its prey. The sculptor wrote of this work ‘From our house high above the Dart estuary I see birds of prey circling and hovering and diving on their victims. In creating Hunting Bird I want to create a sense of threatening power, beauty and movement.’ Although trained initially as a painter at Farnham College of Art, McCrum latterly took up sculpture, working mainly in stone. The influence of Brancusi is clear in her other work at Lismore, Poised Bird. A deceptively simple shape carved in stone, it again has been sited to form a terminal point in one of the walks in the top garden. McCrum describes the work: ‘I simplified it to little more than a pebble, but retained the feeling of a bird. By placing this simple form on a tall plinth
I made a small sculpture fit in a large space without losing its impact.’ Recently, a hedge screen has been planted a metre or so behind this sculpture. When the hedge has grown, it will provide a backdrop for another sculpture to mark the termination of the transverse walk.
When Boyle acquired Lismore from Raleigh, it was in ruins, but in 1614 he set to work to restore the castle. He engaged a stone mason to cut a coat of arms and crest for the gateway, while glasurs‚ were employed to put the castle staircase into colours. In 1620, on being created Earl of Cork he moved his place of residence from Youghal to Lismore. Two years later he records employing plasterers to ‘ceil with fret work my study, my bedchamber and the nursery at Lismore, and to wash them with Spanish white’. One thousand feet of paved terracing was laid out, at ‘fivepence a foot’. This terracing survives, and at the south end of the transverse walk on the Top Terrace, stands Simon Thomas’s sculpture Moonbeam , carved in Carrera Marble. Evoking the white disc of the the moon and the cycle of the seasons, Moonbeam was commissioned in 1990 and made over a six-month period in Italy.
Perched on a plinth beside the Central Walk, between McCrum’s Hunting Bird and Emily Young’s Warrior Head, a bronze bust entitled The Irishman, sculpted in 1907 by Edwin Whitney Smith, is perhaps the least felicitous occupant of the Upper Garden. Whitney Smith was born in Bath and studied there and at Bristol. A cheerful portrait, the work is characterised by the artist’s Academic Realist approach, and seems out of place amongst the more fluid, abstracted forms of Moonbeam or Poised Bird.

Described by Dorothea Townshend as the ‘Iron King’, Boyle’s fortunes were based largely on exploiting the haematite ores that occurred at various locations in the Blackwater Valley. Raleigh had begun to work a mine at Tallow—its name in Irish means ‘Iron Hill’—but Boyle sunk new mines at Ballyregan, Cappoquin and other locations. His foundries produced mainly iron bars, but also knives, and guns.3 The forests of the Blackwater provided charcoal to fire the forges that glowed along the river. Celebrating his material success, and seemingly unconcerned with tempting fate, thirty years before his death Boyle commissioned an elaborate Renaissance funerary monument for himself, preserved at St Mary’s Abbey in Youghal. It includes portraits of all of his children, including his seventh son, Robert Boyle, the philosopher and scientist, who was born at Lismore in January 1626.

But perhaps a more fitting memorial to the ‘Iron King’ than the self-aggrandising monument in St Mary’s, is the contemporary cast iron sculpture by Anthony Gormley Learning to Be I, sited in the lower garden at the end of the Yew Walk. The location was an inspired choice. This unique sculpture of a single standing male figure stands in a pool of light on the lawn, providing a focal point at the end of the dark nave of yew trees. The avenue is very old, dating back to when the Lower Gardens were still part of the village of Lismore. Recently, new yews have been planted in the avenue, from cuttings and seeds taken from the existing trees. Although Learning to Be I was cast in a modern foundry, near Huddersfield, the process has changed little since Boyle’s day. The mould was made using the artist’s own body as model and the sculpture was then cast in sections, in sand. The sections were welded together, and the joints ‘fettled’ or smoothed down, although the seams remain clearly visible. In many of Gormley’s sculptures, the seams suggest a three-dimensional grid, within which the body is formed. The air trapped inside the finished sculpture is listed by the artist as a component of the work.

Born in London in 1950 to Irish parents and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth, Gormley trained initially as an archaeologist and anthropologist. After university, he travelled and lived for a period in India. His work retains much of the feeling of the ancient world. Unconcerned with copying the detail of the human body, his art is not about representation, but rather the dynamics of human existence. While the Christian tradition is evident in his work, he has also been inspired by other religions. Learning to Be I evokes both the form of carved granite sculptures of priests and pharaohs and also the concept of resurrection which formed a central part of religious belief in ancient Egypt. Gormley’s Angel of the North, sited beside a motorway near Gateshead, is perhaps the most impressive public sculpture created in Britain in the 20th century. Learning to Be I is part of a series that includes Learning to See and Learning to Think. These works are intended to express human awakening through sight, thought and self-awareness. Although it is tempting to make a simple analogy between the iron representing the body and the air contained within representing the soul, the artist emphasizes that his work should not be seen in terms of a clear-cut dialectic between body and spirit, or between mind and matter, but rather in terms of an acceptance of human existence, an acknowledgement of the limits of mortality. In formal terms, Gormley uses the ‘language’ of sculpture - weight, mass, shape and texture - to refer to less tangible elements, such as space, time and human consciousness.

The avenue of yews at Lismore has many legends associated with it, one being that Raleigh’s friend, the poet Edmund Spenser, who lived at Kilcolman Castle not far distant, wrote The Faerie Queen while sitting in its shade. Spenser’s caustic opinion of his adopted country was expressed in his View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he described the ‘brat‚ or great cloak’ a style of clothing favoured by the Irish, as ‘a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief.’ Spenser expounded at length on his theme: ‘When it raineth, it is his penthouse; when it bloweth, it is his tent; when it freezeth, it is his tabernacle. In summer he can wear it loose; in winter he can wrap it close; at all times he can use it; never heavy, never cumbersome. Likewise for a rebel it is serviceable; for in this war that he maketh (if at least it deserves the name of war), when he still flieth from his foe, and lurketh in the thickwoods and straight passages, waiting for advantages, it is his bed, yea, and almost his household stuff.’

Echoes of the Gaelic Irish great cloak or mantle recur in both sculptures by Eilis O’Connell sited in the Lower Garden. The older work Wrapt suggests a cloak both in its form and title, while the newly commissioned work Under and Over IV suggests both a great cloak and also a monk’s cowl, elegantly encompassing the Gaelic monastic tradition of Lismore, which pre-dated the Great Earl. On a formal level, O’Connell’s sculptures are about contained space and penetrated space. There is a suggestion of male and female in Under and Over IV, which also, with its tall conical profile, echoes the tall narrow spire of Lismore cathedral, designed in the early 19th century by James Pain (who also designed the bridge at Chatsworth).

Born in Derry, O’Connell studied sculpture at the Crawford School of Art in Cork from 1970-74. In 1975 she was a postgraduate student at the Massachusetts College of Art, and since then has lived and worked in London and in Cork. Her public sculpture commissions include The Space Between at Milton Keynes (1992), Secret Station in Cardiff (1992-3), Tower of Light in Wolverhampton (1995-8) and Pero’s Pedestrian Bridge in Bristol (1999). O’Connell’s sculptures combine a sense of a physical presence as well as an intellectual quality. Under and Over (IV) was commissioned specially for the garden at Lismore. Eilis O’Connell describes how the commission evolved. ‘In 1999 I had a solo show at Newlyn Art Centre in Cornwall, where Lord Hartington first saw this piece. The title comes from the process of bending and twisting plywood under and over each other, in an effort to create forms strong enough to withstand the pressure of sand moulding for bronze casting … This sculpture has already become part of the space it occupies. It is an ideal site, it holds the sculpture. As one approaches it, the horizontal ridges on the outer surface create the impression of the sculpture drawing itself within the space. One is drawn towards the cave like space within; I see these kinds of space as an extension of the body, an extra shell or layer to protect the human spirit.’
O’Connell’s second work at Lismore, Wrapt, also evokes the form and protection afforded by a cloak: ‘Wrapt is more about the space outside the body. It’s large, you can walk around it or go inside it. I tend to make sculpture that have protective spaces within them, almost like armour.’4 The relationship between solid and void, between body and spirit, or between history and the present, is explored in the fourth large sculpture in the Lower Garden. Metamorphosis, a bronze sculpture by Italian artist Marzia Colonna. Born in 1951 in Pisa, Colonna moved to England in 1970 with her husband. In this bronze sculpture she takes the Classical theme explored by Ovid, the point where one life form changes into another, and creates an elegant and understated work that contains both figurative and abstract elements. The artist describes the work. ‘Our journey through life is a metamorphic one. Our bodies and our minds are constantly changing through time, through pain, through desire, through need. Using the male and female bodies I have tried in recent years to convey metamorphosis created by human passions and emotions: in Metamorphosis the need for a deep untouched privacy, by turning into a tree’. This last perhaps describes the quality of the gardens at Lismore best, in the achievement of placing sculptures in the landscape in a way that is both informed, and formal, and yet also personal and private. The integration of works of art within a context of mature trees, lawns and walled gardens has been a success at Lismore and hopefully under the careful eye of Lord and Lady Hartingtons, assisted by curator Camilla Davidson, the project will continue to flourish and develop in the coming years.

Peter Murray is the curator of the Crawford Municipal Gallery of Art, Cork.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank Michael Penruddock agent for Lismore Castle.

1 Lismore Castle and Gardens Guide.
2 Dorothea Townshend. The Life and Letters of the Great Earl of Cork London, Duckworth and Company, 1904 p89.
3 Ibid, p142.
4 Eilis O’Connell interviewed by Claire Schneider, Irish Artists in Britain. Crawford Art Gallery, 1999, p116.