Adam's Important Irish Art 5th December 2018

55 www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 4th December 2018 Irish Sculptor Eamonn O’Doherty’s work is amongst the best-known of any contemporary Irish artist. He may also be, as far as name-recognition goes, the least famous. He created so many of Ireland’s late 20th century public sculptures and yet remains relatively anonymous. His best known Irish sculpture is large scale public works including ‘Fauscailt’, County Wexford (1998), ‘Crann an Oir’ (Tree of Gold) Central Bank Plaza Dublin (1991), and the ‘Galway Hookers’, Eyre Square, Galway (1984). He has worked in bronze, stone and various other media. Born in Derry, he grew up in the West End Park area of the city. He graduated from University College Dublin with an Architecture degree and was awarded a Visiting Scholarship to Harvard University. Before turning to sculpture full-time in 2002, he lectured for many years at the Faculty of Architecture at the Dublin Institute of Technology as well as the University of Jordan, the University of Nebraska and the Ecole Speciale d’Archi- tecture in Paris. Although O’Doherty has bordered on abstraction with such works as the Galway Hookers, which seems to constantly change with the light that informs it, he is not, by nature an abstract artist. Like another Irish Sculptor, Seamus Murphy, he was deeply involved in the idea of Irishness, in particular the idea that Ireland is an island and the sense of leaving it and setting out. O’Doherty’s The Emigrants is intentionally sentimental, focusing on a family group who are leaving Ireland (Derry was a major port of exodus for Irish after the fam- ine) for America. They are carrying luggage, a book, a fiddle, to indicate the cultural baggage that emigrants brought to the New World.