EILÍS O’CONNELL

essay by Charles Hall

ISBN 978 0946641 369    64 pages (paperback)    28x22cm    54 illus

Gathered together in this book are some of Eilís O’Connell’s most dynamic public commissions, each accompanied by an artist’s description and stunning photography. Her smaller studio works are also featured, providing a valuable overview of the sculptor’s work up to the 1990s.

EXTRACT

"Perhaps the key to the fascination of O’Connell’s work is the ease with which she moves between the physical and the archetypal. It shouldn’t be forgotten that her use of industrial or hi-tech shapes and structures is inspired not only by a sense of their aptness to a particular situation but by a sculptor’s intense interest in the formal possibilities they represent – various sculptures have, over the years, been inspired by factory chimneys, air vents and an early satellite. A recent work, in which fibre optics pump light through two hearts cast in lead crystal, reflects in part a technician’s admiration for the power of the heart as a muscular structure – not just for its poetic resonance. Whether in the smaller, more personal works, with their strong, almost architectural forms unfolding into lines of sweeping, fleshy elegance, or swirling open to reveal cool inner spaces, or in the more formal, more assertive public works, the last few years seem to have resulted in work in which this movement is achieved in an ever-more relaxed and accomplished style, allowing the evolution of a personal sculptural language of unusual clarity and force."

— Charles Hall