Visionary or Magic Realist? Brian Fallon evaluates the art of Patrick Hennessy
Painter and master printmaker Stephen Lawlor talks to Brian McAvera about the nuance of approach required for each medium, ahead of his solo show at Oliver Sears Gallery this winter
Mic Moroney navigates Stephen Brandes’ satirical visual diary featuring in ‘Phoenix Rising’ at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
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
Michael Craig-Martin’s giant ‘Drawings’ at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire by Peter Murray
THE ROMANTIC GARDEN
DESIGNS OF CATHERINE
FITZGERALD BY PETER MURRAY
Daphne Wright is known for her unsettling sculptural installations that tap into the fragility of the human condition: in conversation with Bnan McAvera she recalls the source of her inspiration
At the height of his career, American artist Morris Graves moved to Ireland, where he found a ‘kind of magic ‘; Peter Murray recalls the sojourn
John Kelly’s enrollment in school in the 1950’s marked the beginning of a fully realized career in the arts; Gerry Walker remembers the noted artist and printmaker
Michael Warren has been consistent in his desire to marry the contemplative and the concrete: here he tells Brian McAvera, ‘to make is, for me, to make matter, matter’
Robert Ballagh discovers a family lineage in Jim Fitzpatrick’s fusion of art and politics
Compared to metal and marble sugar and wax may seem like frivolous materials but sculptor Brenda Jamison is made of sterner stuff, as Brian McAvera discovers
Irish-born artist George William Joy was an accomplished and cosmopolitan figure, who created one of the Victorian era’s most popular paintings, writes Julian Campbell
Jane Fenlon considers the political iconography at work in John Michael Wright’s remarkable portrait of Sir Neil O’Neill
Peter Murray traces the colourful career of Robert Fagan whose art was inspired by antique examples discovered in Rome
Hilary Pyle takes a fresh look at John Butler Yeats, the patriarch of Ireland’s leading artistic family.
William Turner de Lond captured two significant political events during his sojourn in Ireland, examined here by Mary Jane Boland.
As Europe confronts its current refugee crisis, Kathryn Milligan looks back to 1916 when a Belgian artist was one of the 2,300 Belgian refugees who sought shelter in Ireland.
Fashion designer Simone Rocha’s rise to fame by Deirdre McQuillan
The avant-garde furniture of Joseph Walsh by Susan Rogers and Alannah Hopkin
Clár Ní Dhuibheannaigh charts how a boyhood dream became a reality for Will Sliney whose Cú Chulainn illustrations are based on the Táin Bó Cúailgne
Reflecting on a career marked by invention and experiment, distinguished sculptor Bob Sloan tells Brian McAvera, ‘I find working in the studio as difficult as ever. Nothing comes easy’
Catherine Marshall assesses the unwavering artistic journey of Maria Simonds-Gooding in advance of her retrospective in Dublin
Misfortune compelled Grace Gifford to assume a political role, yet her true passion for the theatre emerges in her witty drawings, writes Hilary Pyle
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.