Misfortune compelled Grace Gifford to assume a political role, yet her true passion for the theatre emerges in her witty drawings, writes Hilary Pyle
Orpen’s oil of his pupil, Grace Gifford (1888-1955),1 as Young Ireland, portrays the ‘smiling woman’ he deemed fashionable,2 the quintessence of youthful confidence (Fig 1). His young nationalist sitter came from a complex background,3 as did many of her contemporaries anticipating a free Ireland. Her parents, Catholic and Protestant – both Unionist in outlook – took an active interest in the arts, and saw half their family of twelve following their father into the law, the other half turning to creative work of some kind. Frederick Gifford, a wealthy solicitor and land agent, loved and performed drama, especially the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operas. One great uncle had abandoned a prestigious painting career to become Director of the National Gallery in London, while another had famously attempted to found a socialist colony on his estate during the 1830s. J B Yeats, Griffith and other leading cultural figures, came to their ‘At Homes’.
What is it about the work of the Irish sculptor Eilís O’Connell that has led to her having created, in this most difficult and masculine medium, over thirty permanent site-specific installations in Britain and Europe, including the sensual, orchid-like Unfurl (Fig 1), a bronze commissioned by Kensington Borough Council and the residents of Kensington Gate, to celebrate the Millennium?
O’Connell subtly combines a number of different elements that give her work both a sense of physical vitality and poetic metaphor. It is monumental yet intimate, atavistic yet contemporary. From discarded agricultural tools to birds’ nests and whale bones she appropriates the quotidian and the natural to create dynamic forms in stone, steel, resin, plaster and bronze. Like her poetic compatriot, Seamus Heaney, O’Connell looks to the archaeology and topography of her Irish homeland for inspiration but the ideas she finds there are filtered through a considered relationship to architecture and geometry. The work is never soft: emotion is always tempered by intellect and painstaking technique to combine something of the muscularity of Richard Serra with the female sensibility of Barbara Hepworth. Science and mathematics meet the natural world within her organic and biomorphic forms. Inside and outside coalesce. In the layered and slippery space of contemporary culture she has created objects that generate a unifying narrative and suggest a philosophy of interdependence rather than of confrontation, an openness and desire for contact and inclusivity, rather than a brittle postmodern autonomy, which unapologetically recalls the timeless resonances of Brancusi.
Anne Hodge and Peter Harbison examine the visual evidence of Daniel O’Connell’s unusual conditions of imprisonment in the Richmond Bridewell, Dublin
Ursula Burke, Emma Donaldson and Deirdre McKenna explore the mutable topic of time at the F E McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge. Claire Dalton looks at their responses