THE ROMANTIC GARDEN
DESIGNS OF CATHERINE
FITZGERALD BY PETER MURRAY
Over the past decade, working between London and Co Limerick, Catherine FitzGerald has built up an impressive reputation as a leading garden designer. Inspired by the Edwardian watercolour paintings of Mildred Anne Butler, Fanny Currey and Rose Barton, and by the work of William Robinson. Gertrude Jekyll and Russell Page, her signature style is elegiac and romantic, but with a contemporary twist that prevents her gardens from being simply exercises in nostalgia. The taste that FitzGerald brings to designing is the outcome of being immersed in the world of fine arts from an early age. The eldest daughter of Olda and Desmond FitzGerald, she grew up in an atmosphere imbued with a regard for painting, sculpture, landscape and architecture. Visits to houses and gardens. such as those at Birr Castle. Mount Usher and Tullynally, as well as Helen Dillon’s garden in Ranelagh, were an integral part of her life from an early age. Author of several books on garden design. her mother Olda FitzGerald is also highly regarded by gardeners and has overseen many improvements at Glin, while her father. the late Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, was a leading Irish art historian.
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