Remarkably, Eilis O'Connell's current exhibition at the Fenton Gallery is her first in Cork since graduating from what was then the Crawford School (now College) of Art in 1977. Since then, she has kept up an exceptional level of work and built a reputation, both at home and abroad, as one of the foremost Irish sculptors. Though she has latterly been based in London, she has re-established her local ties, having just spent the summer in west Cork, and she intends, she says, to split her time between London and rural Cork. When she managed to acquire her small house there, she literally thought of it "as buying space".
Her father was a customs officer who was stationed at Bridgend, a border village on the Derry-Letterkenny road at the time of her birth. To add to the sense of in-betweenness, he was a Southerner and her mother a Northerner. She enjoyed her rural childhood and then, when she was about 10 years old; the family moved to Cork, and the shift to a suburban existence and the regimentation of what she remembers as a repressively Catholic convent school was "intolerable". The Crawford School of Art at the time wasn't much better. But she recalls two good teachers, the sculptor John Burke and the painter Maurice Desmond, and she feels she learned to thrive through being critical of her environment.
Burke had introduced abstract, fabricated steel sculpture to Cork, and O'Connell took instantly to steel, which remains a favourite material. But apart from a formalist, modernist aesthetic, she was also interested in ancient objects and structures, an interest perhaps sparked by her childhood proximity to the Grianan of Aileach, a stone-built hill fort set inside an elaborate series of earthworks. Archaeology, as fact and metaphor (in the sense of unearthing and finding objects and forms), remains an enduring influence.
Her early, more-or-less formalist work gave way to distinctly fluid, organic pieces using a diverse range of materials from stone to feathers and hand-made paper, always involving elaborate spatial play. In the latter half of the 1980s, a series of big, swirling pieces, consisting of painted canvas stretched over steel frameworks, presaged her fully mature work of the 1990s, in which everything she had previously done is synthesised into a streamlined language of sculptural form. As she says herself, at heart she loves objects, be they natural or synthetic. She doesn't privilege natural form, casting pieces from pliers and hammerheads because she likes the elegance of the shapes, for example. But the female body, in part or in whole, is central to her imagery.
The Fenton show consists entirely of her personal, private work, but she has also made several fine large-scale publicly-sited sculptures in Britain, including her remarkable Secret Station in Cardiff docklands, its twin bronze towers producing steam and light; a piece in Kilkenny limestone at the Isle of Dogs in London; and, in collaboration with Ove Arup engineers, an elaborate pedestrian bridge over the River Frome in Bristol.
Always keen to try new materials, she has been doing a great deal with cast resin, "a dark art", as she puts it.
"It's a difficult material," she says, looking with a mixture of fondness and exasperation at one beautiful amber-like resin piece, The Square Inside. "You never quite know what it's going to do. Sometimes it explodes." I'm taken aback. "No, really, it goes whoosh!" she elaborates vividly. "It sort of effervesces and that's it, it's gone. You see, it's an industrial material, and if you let it loose in the studio it is to some extent an unknown quantity."
There are larger pieces as well at the Fenton, including Deep Skirt, one of two works sited in the fine courtyard space, and Po- tent, which is indoors. Potent exemplifies her ambiguous approach to the body as subject. An adult-human-sized, irregularurn-shaped floor piece, it is surely a figure of sorts - a body. Its surface, purply brown in colour, looks as soft and sensual as skin and absorbs the light.
O'Connell often curtails her forms with cuts that can be as brutal as amputations, leaving cavities that are, like the body's openings, both natural and as shocking as wounds. In fact, she admits, she recently had another go at Potent, which was ostensibly finished, trimming its tapering neck a little more. The real tension between the bulbous form, which is quite comfortable with itself, and the exposed vulnerability of the gaping top, opening the way from exterior to the secrets of the interior, is absolutely typical and has to do with a certain streak of ruthlessness.
She works by instinct, excavating images from memory but unsure of their import, and several concerns feed into an individual piece. Topology, for example, continually fascinates her. "I love discovering forms that you can only find by doing, by actually making them."
That applies to The Square Inside, which derives from folding two equilateral triangles.
There is a surreal quality to the composite Enmeshed, which is essentially a woven, breast-like form with a vaginal opening in place of a nipple. This is a kind of acting out of a metaphorical construction, a striking visualisation of the simultaneous superimposition of several word-images one over the other: hollowed breast-basket-womb-vagina. But the "skin" of the breast is itself broken and discontinuous because it is fashioned by means of one of her favourite methods of fabrication, woven metal - more usually steel but in this case brass.
Apart from the reference to craft, a feminist reading of this might be that the woven metal disrupts the potential smoothness and polish of the metal, and prevents the form becoming a seamless mirror for the narcissistic male gaze.
This particular quality, of a potentially smooth, unbroken surface made porous, transparent or discontinuous is an enduring feature of her work, strikingly so for an artist so intensely committed to the quality of surface finish.
Casting her eyes over a series of translucent, coloured, resin blocks, she remarks that she became completely obsessed by their surfaces. "I have no idea how many times they were sanded. I kept coming back to them." She says this in a slightly puzzled tone, as though remarking on an inexplicable personal quirk, but of course this obsessiveness is just part of her underlying killer instinct, her utter determination to get exactly what she wants in terms of every aspect of her work. It has characterised her approach from her earliest work, and, though she may not know it herself, she will never lose it.
Eilis O'Connell is exhibiting at the Fenton Gallery, Cork until November 25th
