Vivienne Roche belongs to a generation who transformed what sculpture could be. ‘I don’t consider myself an object-maker. I work with place and change’, she tells Brian McAvera while her exhibition continues at the Royal Hibernian Academy
Brian McAvera: You were born in Cork in 1953, a city whose ‘otherness’ has been well summed up by Seán O’Faoláin in his autobiography. Do you think that its distinctive ambience and history influenced your work?
Vivienne Roche: Even as a child I understood it to be a small city and I felt it to be a personal one. I was born in the house I grew up in: the only member of my family born there. The Edwardian house was on a road that formed a boundary between the city and the country even though it was only about a mile from the city centre. My father was an engineer, my school a few doors from his office in the city centre. I often went on site visits with him. My own sense of the city was the physicality of it rather than the people: buildings, bridges, Sutton’s building going on fire and being let out of school to see it; a ship hitting a bridge, hearing the thud, and being allowed out to see that too! I think, yes, the city’s industrial base has certainly influenced my work. Verolme Dockyard, where I made my first commissioned sculpture, and which functioned until the 1980s – Dunlop’s, Sunbeam’s, Ford’s, all had large workforces.
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