Adam's The Deborah Brown Collection 1st October 2024

17 To the public Deborah Brown is best known for Sheep on the Road (1991), her life size sculpture which now stands by the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. To artists and critics familiar with her work, she was a radical and innova- tive artist, one of the first in Ireland to embrace abstraction, experiment with fibreglass and engage with the international avant-garde including Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. A quiet, unassuming person most at home in Ramelton, it was often easy to forget that she was a student in Dublin in the late 1940s, lived in Paris in 1950 and exhibited in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and ROSC during the 1970s. Not content to limit herself to one art form or medium, her oeu- vre ranged from bronze sculptures and figurative paintings to minimalist compositions, papier-mâché sculptures and fibreglass reliefs. Some of the most remarkable of Brown’s glass fibre works are Glass Fibre Form I and II (1976). These diminutive sculptures are pure gestures of res- in that are displayed in Perspex boxes. Like spun sugar these works have retained their translucent quality and have a grace and beauty that it is more common in nature than art. They are the sculptural equivalent of paintings such as White Brush Strokes on Canvas (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1962), gestural compositions that look deceptively simple but balance perfect restraint with expressive power. The calligraphic quality of the Glass Fibre Forms and Brush Strokes is reminiscent of Japanese art where years of training results in the fluency and confidence to make a mark that only takes seconds to execute. Restraint, delicacy and economy of expression are also the characteristic features of Brown’s later figurative works such as Seated Figure II (1981). Constructed from wire and paper, these translucent sculptures are decep- tively simple. Rooted in the stage sets and props that Brown made for the Lyric Theatre during the 1950s, their fragility and physical lightness make them appear temporary despite having lasted for over 30 years. Remark- ably, Brown’s installation Waiting , now in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery, is simply a larger version of her small paper sculptures. An im- posing and ambitious piece, Waiting was one of the earliest installations to enter a public collection in Ireland. We think of papier-mâché as child’s play but with these simple means, Brown created works of great expres- sive power. Dr. Riann Coulter, August 2024