Public Art

THE JOKER’S CHAIR IS A MEMORIAL TO DERMOT MORGAN

March 20, 2023 by infomatique

BEST KNOWN AS FATHER TED

In 2002, Dermot Morgan’s partner commissioned Galway-born sculptor Catherine Greene to design and produce a memorial statue.

Already a celebrity in Ireland, Morgan got his big break in Britain with Channel 4’s Irish sitcom Father Ted, which ran for three series from 1995 to 1998. Writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews auditioned many actors for the title role, but Morgan’s enthusiasm won him the part.

Father Ted focuses on the misadventures of three morally dubious Irish Catholic priests, whose transgressions have caused them to be exiled to the fictional Craggy Island, off the coast of County Galway.

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THE VICTIMS BY ANDREW O’CONNOR IN MERRION SQUARE PARK

March 19, 2023 by infomatique

PHOTOGRAPHED 18 MARCH 2023

The more you examine this sculpture the more detail you will notice and that adds to the initial shock.

When I first photographed this work I thought that it depicted the removing of Jesus from the cross and while I was photographing a young girl asked her mother “is that God lying on a table” but I discovered that it is a lot more complicated that that.

This figurative sculpture, The Victims originated as a part of an unexecuted project for a war memorial for Washington, DC. The artist, Andrew O’Connor, conceived the idea of a huge war memorial in about 1918 and worked on the project until at least 1931. However, no such monument was ever commissioned from him.

The memorial consisted of three sections. The first of which was a group of three figures; a dead soldier strapped to a bier, mourned by his wife and his mother. The figure of the dead soldier is The Victim, inscribed with the words; ‘Naked you came into the world’, the kneeling figure of The Wife with her hands clasped in prayer is variously called The Virgin or Mother of Sorrows. She is inscribed; ‘As cranes chanting their dolorous notes traverse the sky’ which is taken from a translation of Dante’s Inferno. The standing female figure of The Mother of the Hero leans mournfully on her left elbow. The Victim was presented by the family of the sculptor to the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane) in 1947 while the other two figures were presented to the gallery by the sculptor in 1938. As is often the case with O’Connor’s work he produced other versions of some of these figures.

A plaster version of The Victim is in the O’Connor family collection and a version of The Wife is at the Tate Gallery, London. The group would have been assembled with The Victim on a raised plinth, his wife kneeling at his head, his mother standing at his feet. The Victims was installed in 1976 following an exhibition to mark the centenary of the sculptor’s birth at Trinity College Dublin in 1974. It would appear that it was not until 1974 that the three figures were displayed together as originally intended creating this uncompromising figurative representation of the victims of war.

Born in Worchester, Massachusetts, USA in 1874, Andrew O’Connor was the son of an Irish-American sculptor of the same name. Having studied under his father, O’Connor Jr. began working regularly on public monuments and funerary commissions in the United States. In London c.1894-8, he met John Singer Sargent and assisted him on reliefs for his Boston Library decorations.

Andrew O’Connor’s style was formulated by the time he first visited Paris in about 1903 and his earliest work is in the Franco-American style which had become popular in America by 1900.

Unlike the majority of other American sculptors he remained in France and worked from a Paris studio up to 1914. From 1906 on he exhibited annually at the Salon in Paris and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1907. He then returned to the USA from 1914 to the mid 1920s and received numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments including the monument to Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois and the Theodore Roosevelt memorial at Glenview, Chicago.

O’Connor spent his last years in Europe, first in Paris, then from c. 1932 between Ireland and London. He resided in Dublin for the last seven months of his life and passed away at his home at No.77 Merrion Square.

ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE IS BETTER KNOWN AS THE FLOOZY IN THE JACUZZI

March 17, 2023 by infomatique

ST PATRICK’S DAY 2023

Anna Livia is a bronze monument formerly located on O’Connell Street in Dublin.

Designed by the sculptor Eamonn O’Doherty, the monument was commissioned by businessman Michael Smurfit, in memory of his father, for the Dublin Millennium celebrations in 1988.

The monument is a personification of the River Liffey which runs through the city. Anna Livia Plurabelle is the name of a character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake who also embodies the river.

The river is represented as a young woman sitting on a slope with water flowing past her. She is familiarly known by the people of Dublin as the Floozie in the Jacuzzi, or the Whore in the Sewer (pronounced hoo-er to rhyme with sewer) among other names. Both nicknames were encouraged by the sculptor himself.

The monument was removed from its site on O’Connell Street in 2001 to make room for the Spire of Dublin.

I have been told that in Birmingham in the UK there is a somewhat similar statue and that the public there have adopted the same nickname for it.

KIND WORDS NEVER DIE

February 3, 2023 by infomatique

BY NAVINE G. DOSSOS

IMMA invited the artist Navine G. Dossos to realise an ambitious new commission for IMMA’s iconic courtyard, titled Kind Words Can Never Die, the work explores new psychological states that have emerged in response to a greater awareness of global and local climate change.

Inspired by the books Earth Emotions (2019) by Glenn Albrecht, and Thought Forms (1901) by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, these wall paintings designed through a series of workshops at IMMA, explore how we can use colour to express emotional states, and make images of these complex feelings that can be both negative and positive responses to ecological change.

Navine G. Dossos is a visual artist working between London and Athens. Her interests include Orientalism in the digital realm, geometry as information and decoration, image calibration, and Aniconism in contemporary culture. She has developed a form of geometric abstraction that merges the traditional Aniconism of Islamic art with the algorithmic nature of the interconnected world we live in. This is not the formal abstraction we understand from the western history of art, but something essentially informational, and committed to investigation and communication.

Dossos is a painter, and uses this medium and its history to ask fundamental questions about the ways in which we see, understand and represent the world around us. Her work suggests that contrary to the mediatic impulses of the present, we must not rely upon, nor constantly reproduce, the figurative language of television, online media, videos, and the endlessly circulating images which shape our shared imagination of reality. Her work frequently emphasises the contrast between the timeless and the ephemeral, whether in the painting over of temporary murals, her own effacement of underlying works in ongoing series where each iteration is applied over the last, or her choices of material, from traditional icon boards to cardboard and found wood, and the balancing of classical training and technique with a constant reappraisal and critique of the contemporary.