St. Patrick’s Street

REPRESENTING A VIKING NEEDLE AND A CHURCH STEEPLE

Usually it is impossible to properly photograph this public art installation because every time I try someone walks into frame.

1994 Sentinel consists of two major elements which are described below.

Sentinel responds to its historic setting outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. The larger form is based on a Viking needle found on the site during excavations. As with Liberty Bell (by the same artist) in the adjacent St. Patrick’s Park, it uses existing architectural features to extend its reach.

Vivienne Roche is a sculptor who lives and works near the sea in Co. Cork, Ireland

Over the last three or four decades she has worked in large-scale bronze, glass, steel, sailcloth, stuccodore plaster, and reconfigured landscape. Drawing, watercolour and photography have also been central to her work. Her artistic themes derive from site-specific dialogues between architecture and sculpture, the emotional resonances of the coastal landscape in which she lives, relationships between male and female, archaeology sites and their artefacts, and between music and the visual. Light has been a central focus as is evidenced in commissioned artworks such as NC Iris (2006), Whitelight Garden (2006), Light Ensemble (2008) and Light House (2009)