Former marine biologist John Coll turned to sculpture in order to enhance his understanding of nature, writes Gerry Walker
John Coll’s sculpture studio in Dublin’s north inner city is a large repository of finished works and works-in-progress full of found objects waiting to be studied and used as starting points for new projects. Situated beside the Liffey it is a far remove from his origins in Galway and the wild Atlantic coastal environs, which he explores so assiduously.
Born in 1959 he started his career as a marine biologist having qualified at Galway University and worked at that profession for a number of years. He developed an interest in art at university when he first read the letters of Vincent van Gogh and found personal resonances in the feeling for nature, which Van Gogh had described to his brother Theo. These simple yet profound expressions of reverence for nature found full and easy expression in Van Gogh’s paintings and at that point in his career Coll understood that he wanted to enhance his scientific appreciation of the natural world by using artistic media. This realization provides an insight into understanding what informs his work today. He first studied art at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT) and followed up with a further year of learning the craft of welding in all its forms under the auspices of what was then known as AnCo, the State-run vocational training facility.
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