Profile °20 – TOM FITZGERALD

essays by Suzanne O’Shea, Seán Ó Laoire; interview by Jim Savage 

ISBN 978 0946846 610      84 pages (paperback)     22.5x22.5 cm    92 illus

This book is a retrospective look at the work of the sculptor Tom Fitzgerald. It features and in-depth essay and extensive interview with the artist.

EXTRACTS

"Fitzgerald has, over the years, been on a quest to gather what he knows best – his home place [Kildimo, Co Limerick] – into a sculptural or installative space, to impose order on it either in the form of framed architectonic drawings or carefully delineated installations, context-bound and context-dependent. His attitude to sculptural form is careful, informed by an acute awareness of exploiting gravity and the intrinsic relationship between the form an object may take and the ground on which it lies. He realises that it is a sense of gravity that mediates our visual perception of sculpture with our conceptual knowledge of its real form, and it is perhaps this knowledge of an interplay of essential dualities that has continued to drive his work."

— from the essay by Suzanne O’Shea

"Fitzgerald’s most recent work demonstrates a graphic mastery and a puckish, acerbic and ironic wit not fully or as easily evident in the corpus of his three-dimensional work. There is also an undisguised and unapologetic anger in much of this work. The drawings are replete with motifs and images which recur in Fitzgerald’s sculpture, which no doubt have their genesis in sketches and sketchbooks. Compositionally, they are elegant and spare, with a sure command of surface line and, not surprisingly, space. The references to classicism and quotations from other painters, and indeed the Christian-Judeo tradition, might precipitate a rush to label this work as postmodernist. Often the impetus and rationale for this tendency is facile and spurious, and predicated on fashion and style. Like good architecture, Fitzgerald’s sculptures have always colonised and inhabited space with a sense of commanding inevitability. Fitzgerald’s work is characterised by counterpoint, juxtaposition, craft, and a superb understanding of materials. Architects would do well to emulate his handling of materials, which help define his works’ timeless and enduring qualities."

— from the essay by Seán Ó Laoire

"When I make sculpture I can never be sure what it will mean, either to myself or the viewer. Like Christopher Columbus, I don’t know if I will find a new world or will I fall off the edge of the old one? The making process is a continual trade-off between what I think I want to do and what I am able to do in a particular situation. I say ‘what I think I want to do’ rather than ‘what I want to do’, because I know, when I get going and start getting feedback from what I have done, all kinds of new possibilities arise and new decisions have to be made about how the form is developing; how different materials are working off each other; how technical problems can be dealt with in a way sympathetic to the developing idea; what kind of contribution the introduction of a new material may make to the feeling of the piece; what effect a change of scale will have, etc. All these considerations are interwoven unconsciously, I think, in the making process, which means that the original impulse or idea is considerably modified, or even completely changed, as the work progresses."

— Tom Fitzgerald in conversation with Jim Savage