by Tom Mooney
In the late 1990’s, when the government of the day was splashing out, an initiative to make modern art accessible outside of the gallery, was decentralised.
The Per Cent for Art Scheme approved the inclusion in the budgets for public bodies delivering capital programmes of up to 1% as funding for public art.
The fruits of that decision is plain to see the length and breadth of the country, particularly as sculpture, most of it ambitious in scale, was commissioned to christen the new road network.
Wexford’s exploitation of the Per Cent for Art Scheme was, in essence, more community based, and never less than symbolic. David Kinnane’s Waterstory in Bunclody is a book with layered pages to represent the Slaney; Landscape of Light reflects the spiritual dimension of St. John’s Community Hospital in Enniscorthy; the rings at Cluain Huighead Estate were inspired by New Ross’s heritage as a walled town and the six aluminum double ring units on the N25- which appear to shift as you drive by – are the alphabet of the ephemeral.
The late Dick Joynt from Bree created a magnificent granite ram (30 tons), representing one of the cornerstones of the Wicklow agriculture, and he stands sentinel at a busy roundabout outside Bray.
There are, of course, sculptures of commemorative and political gestation: the bicentenary of 1798 is firmly etched into the Wexford landscape, from Austin McQuinn’s Three Bullets Gate in New Ross to the iconic monuments in Killane, Oulart Hill and Slieve Coillte.
Some are aesthetically easy on the eye, and many aren’t.
However, the legacy of the Per Cent for Art Scheme is, one hopes, a greater appreciation of the importance of sculpture in both a figurative and mythical sense: Denis O’Connor’s The Last Oak Tree at Ballymacksey, with musical instruments sprouting from silver branches, segues the county’s love affair with music, while Declan Breen’s less epic It Was a Wednesday Afternoon at Millhaven, Castlebridge, is evocatively mundane, devoid of obfuscatory trimmings.
Two contemporary sculptors who pre-date the Per Cent for Art Scheme are Colm Brennan and Leo Higgins, co-founders of the Sculptures Society of Ireland, and the progenitors of From a Deep Well, a major exhibition of bronze and woodcuts in the Greenacres Gallery, opening from Saturday.
Leo and Wexford-based Colm established the Cast Ltd. Bronze Foundry in Dublin in 1987, which was in fact the birth place of many of the works commissioned by local government in Ireland. The Greenacres show marks three decades since they first exhibited together.
From conception as a sketch on paper, to sprueing, to the negative cavity, to the breaking of the mold, to the welding, to the chasing and finally the patination of the metal, their love of the versatility of material bronze is celebrated in From A Deep Well.
The creative process seems as arduous as the life cycle behind Brennan’s Moy Salmon (silver plated bronze): from egg on the redds, to parr, to molt, to the Atlantic, back to the river as a grilse, and the final emaciated act of the celt.
The life cycle of the salmon is not dissimilar from the progression of molten bronze from the crucible, a process of evolution through clearly defined stages, and each stubborn demarcation is a portal to the next step.
With his study of both horses and birds, Brennan is a refreshing antidote to the epic, with an assiduously sentient approach to minute detail: his Wexford Wild Geese and his Oystercatchers, for example, exist in the quietude of their actual nature. There is no suggestion of the violence of the smithy.
Movement is conveyed subtly in Knockavota Calves, the raising of a head as a breeze passes, and in Foal and Spancil Hill Horses, as vigorous, and spry, as any Jack B. Yeats oil. Brennan too has a writer’s eye for narrative, though he cannot be accused of indulgence.
From the figurative to the symbolical, it has been said that Leo Higgins’ repository of the imagination is the landscape and culture of Dublin ( his River-run series, the Liffey), but his series of bird inspired sculptures at Greenacres suggest a kindred fraternity with a more urbane world.
His birds, unlike Brennan’s, are not to be found in the slob, permanently alert, but in the heart or the mind’s eye, suffused with a peaceful equanimity and solitude, an empathy that is never less than compassionate for suffering, or reconciliation, or just merely peace which, as we know, comes dropping slow.
And because his figures are abstract, though in a brilliantly wrought manner, they are, upon first viewing, instantly emotive, reminiscent of the dove of peace unveiled decades ago by Picasso. Brennan reminds us that the sculptor’s gift is to free the figure slumbering in the spell of the material.
