VIVIENNE ROCHE — NC Iris

intro by Brian O’Doherty; essay by Merritt Bucholz

ISBN 978 0948037 443      56 paperback (hardback)     27x21cm    137 illus

Standing 14m tall in an open plaza at the National College of Ireland, NC Iris is a triumph of art and engineering. This book documents the construction of Vivienne Roche’s sculpture from concept sketches to its official unveiling, with artist’s drawings and stunning photography.

EXTRACTS

"Vivienne Roche’s sculpture NC Iris, planted in a steel ‘vase’, flourishes in a garden of contradictions. It turns a more than usually evanescent flower, resistant to easy cultivation, into a steel icon. The iris is a modestly sized flower; its Brobdinagian twin is 14 metres high. You can get a couple of days out of a cut iris; this one will blossom through many winters. At night, the fragile iris holds its yellow tongue, conserving heat and energy; this giant iris, arrayed like a courtier with a spiral ruff, blooms at night in an electric dazzle. Irises need soil and nourishment; this iris grows in a concrete desert. All that the original and its simulation share is that they are odourless. What on earth is it doing here?
          Among public art’s functions is the redemption of architecture, to scale down routine buildings to human size, to focus a dead space. There isn’t anything wrong with the buildings around; they could easily be switched to Hamburg or London. The sculpture, a remarkable conceit, even folly, defines not only its space, it insists on place – a public sculpture’s most important function. As one who, for years, was charged with ‘growing’ public sculpture in public plazas, parks and forecourts with public money, I am quite enchanted with the insouciant choice of a hypertrophied flower for public duties."

— from the introduction by Brian O’Doherty

"Clearly this is no fake flower – it is a highly technological construction which engaged sophisticated minds and powerful computer programs, which required the development of new and innovative processes due to its extremeness, its extraordinary defiance of the natural order of things such as gravity, its demands on man’s ability to calculate the size and strength of the material composition of such a specific and unusual object. In fact, the constructed thing is so complex that it required elaborate computer ‘bridges’ to be constructed between mortal arithmetic, the intuitive engineering guess, and complex calculations précising the geometry of every moment, the thickness of every piece of steel, the resistance of every weld and fixing of every joint. To get an idea of how complex an engineering and fabrication feat NC Iris is, one must realise that the computer programs employed in its design development and calculations were originally developed for the design of aircraft. The geometry of the sculpture was the result of an elaborate and constant negotiation between resistance to natural forces of gravity, and wind load, technologically feasibility, buildability, a definite cost, and a definite time-frame. Innovation is difficult within these circumstances."

— from the essay by Merritt Bucholz