Hearts of stone

With her new show at Visual in Carlow, Eileen MacDonagh has finally realised her dream: to exhibit her vast stone art works inside a gallery, rather than having them on show outside, writes AIDAN DUNNE

FROM THE moment she saw them, Eileen MacDonagh had her sights set on the gallery spaces at Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow. You can see why if you visit Lithosphere, a survey show of her work there.

Apart from creating a beautiful, soaring, site-specific installation, Cathedral, in the biggest of Visual's galleries, it's as if MacDonagh has turned the rest of the space into an indoor stone quarry.

“All my life,” she said with intensity prior to the opening, “I’ve dreamed of showing my work in a space like this. I’ve dreamed about getting these big stone pieces inside a gallery rather than having them on show outside.”

MacDonagh is tall and of athletic build, but there is a gentleness to her manner you wouldn’t quite expect from someone who deals with blocks of stone weighing several tons apiece. Her show’s title refers to the earth’s rocky outer layer, which is appropriate given that she reckons she’s brought about 50 tons of stone to the gallery for the show.

She was born in Geevagh, Co Sligo, in 1956. She studied at Sligo School of Art, where the late Fred Conlon, himself a sculptor, was among her teachers. They became friends, sharing a love of stone and an almost puritanically idealistic commitment to the artistic process. A vocational artist through and through, it often seems as if MacDonagh has chosen a path that virtually precludes reasonable economic return, throwing herself into demanding, labour-intensive projects because she loves what she does. These include several public-art commissions that, despite relatively large budgets, are not generally lucrative for the artist.

Not that she complains, and not that she hasn’t had a nice time along the way. MacDonagh has worked in many interesting locations, at sculptural symposia in India, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, Scotland and elsewhere, as well as in her own studio and at other sites throughout Ireland.

For a number of years she has been based in rural Co Kildare, relatively close to the limestone quarries that girdle the Castlecomer plateau. She is at home in a quarry, forever looking for a block of stone that appeals to her. Some quarries, like McKeon Stone, known for its support of artists, have been helpful and generous. So have places abroad.

In 1995, for example, she took part in a three-week working symposium in Sweden. “I was in the quarry, and I presumed it would be a question of looking for offcuts, or for broken or flawed pieces of stone that they couldn’t do anything else with.”

Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to a monumental piece of granite. “I thought that there was no way that was available to me. But they could see my interest and they said immediately, ‘You can have it.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

The piece is there in Visual, one of a pair of granite pillars, rhythmically incised with horizontal chisel marks, recalling ancient stone columns encoded with Ogham. “Actually,” MacDonagh says, “they explained that the granite was on offer because it’s white, and because there are a couple of discolourations in it. And people prefer the pink granite.”

She calls the mechanical chisel markings “birthmarks”. She doesn’t add them; they come from the way the blocks of stone are cut in the quarry.

MacDonagh is a stone-carver, but she often carves to a minimal degree, preferring to interfere as little as possible with what is already there. She approaches a piece of stone with tact and sensitivity. “I think if you have a piece of stone and you look at it long enough, what you should do with it will come to you. You know Michelangelo’s famous remark about releasing the form from the stone?” She smiles. “I’m not comparing myself to Michelangelo – I’m just saying he was right.”

She likes the ragged textures of freshly quarried granite and limestone. “The quarrymen call them ‘rough backs’. From their point of view it’s just a step on the way to a finished piece of stone, but I want to hold on to it, which can be quite difficult. A bang or a scrape is immediately visible.”

A great deal of calculation and stone-cutting technology went into a beautiful series of works that occupies one entire gallery at Visual, her icosahedrons. The icosahedron is one of the Platonic solids, a regular-sided polyhedron whose triangular faces seem to magically interconnect. Writing about MacDonagh’s work, the poet and physicist Iggy McGovern notes that an icosahedron is coincidentally made up of 20 equilateral triangles and 12 vertices: 2012. The sculptures were made in India, employ a dazzling, colourful range of Indian granites and vary in scale from monumental to minuscule. In MacDonagh’s mind they make up a family, or perhaps a constellation, but she says it is unlikely they can all be kept together in the long run.

The centrepiece of her exhibition is fashioned not from stone but from lightweight materials including styrofoam and papier-mache. Working with a team of collaborators in a local industrial space, she has effectively created a symbolic forest in Visual's vast main gallery. It derives from her sculpture Medusa Tree, which stands permanently in the grounds outside. The "trees" she's made for Cathedralrefer to the cathedral-like quality of some forests. But they are stylised forms that can also be read as, say, outstretched limbs reaching upwards.

It’s a tremendously atmospheric installation that makes brilliant use of the gallery’s high ceilings and natural light, and spending time strolling within it makes for a memorable experience.

The idea of the sacred runs through virtually all of MacDonagh’s work. As well as the forest as a hallowed, spiritual place, elsewhere in the show are references to early church architecture in Ireland – arches, fonts and altarpieces – and evocations of megaliths in the form of both individual standing stones and composite arrangements. Then there is the “sacred geometry” of the icosahedrons. Ancient and modern coexist seamlessly in MacDonagh’s sculptural language. Lithosphere is a superb and, indeed, monumental exhibition.

LITHOSPHEREEileen MacDonagh

Visual, Old Dublin Road, Carlow Until May 7th; visualcarlow.ie