Sculpture: Agnes Conway's sculpture is art in its most concrete form, writes Arminta Wallace.
'Beg, steal, borrow and scrounge - that's what I do," says Agnes Conway, as she crosses the yard of the Fire Station Arts Centre on Dublin's Buckingham Street. Actually, she's a sculptor. If you plan to visit the beautiful gardens at Birr Castle, Co Offaly, this summer, check out the piece she calls "Theatre". In a grassy space redolent of the stone circles of Celtic spiritual tradition, six performers square up to seven audience members. The performers are sinister, Darth Vader-style masks perched on slim pillars: the audience is composed of the same female face, serene and beautiful, repeated seven times - 14, if you count fact that each of the chunky seven-feet blocks contains two heads set back-to-back. "It's my daughter," says Conway. "And this" - she produces a colour photograph of an enormous clay face, 14-feet long by nine-feet high - "is my other daughter. They're the only people who'll stand still long enough for me to photograph them from every angle."
Conway knew she wanted to be a sculptor at the age of four. She went through art college, where she fell permanently in love with clay modelling; and after many years of work on conventionally-sized pieces, she decided to concentrate on large-scale sculptures. "I suddenly realised I didn't have to be part of any movement," she says. "I could just make what I wanted to make. I don't like the sort of sculpture that was made after people discovered metal tools. I prefer soft edges - the kind of shapes rocks have, when they've been eroded by the sea." Working on a large scale has its drawbacks - but also its advantages. "The bigger you work, the easier it gets, physically," she says. "If you do small stuff you have to move it yourself. Once you get to this scale, you're talking machines and cranes."
In the case of sculpture, small isn't necessarily easy. She produces another colour photograph, of a stone head. "That's the only stone carving I've ever done - and I thought I'd die before I finished it. When I started it, I had just found out that my grandfather was a stonemason; and on my mother's side of the family, my great-grandfather was a monumental sculptor, as were all his sons. So I had all these romantic ideas that I'd been bred for it. By the time I finished, the muscles in my arms were like piano wires. I don't know who does stone carving nowadays, but it's torture. You have a big chisel and a big lump-hammer and you go 'boom, boom, boom' - and you can feel your joints being damaged with every bang."
Concrete, now: that's a different matter. "I love concrete," says Conway, with relish. "It's a very kindly material. It's very humble, and it sits very easily in the 21st century. We do so much with it that we don't value it - but it's fantastic material. You can cast it and carve it; it has everything going for it." She points out that while bronze and other expensive metals tend to get melted down and re-used, the spoils of war - materials which have no intrinsic value, such as earth and concrete - just weather naturally. "And, well, there's still concrete in existence from Roman times."
Conway knows all about concrete and weathering, having once designed paving stones for a company near Bath, in England, where she lived for several years. One of her works, a 52ft path which is now in the nursery section of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin, was directly inspired by that experience.
"Because it's built on the site of an extinct volcano and has all those hot springs, Bath has always been a sacred spot. When the Romans came along they pulled down the relief panels from old temples and used them as paving, just because they were handy thin blocks. So you had these stones which, though they were all walked over, you could see had been carved at one time." Conway's paving has a similar feel; not so much carved as haunted by half-glimpsed figures from long ago. "But," she adds, "I think it might be a public liability risk, which is why it's tucked away where only the students and the gardeners go.
In a way, "Theatre" also came into being as a result of Conway's experience as a paving designer. "Dolan Stone, in Drogheda, joined the group of companies I used to work for. When I was doing 'Theatre' I asked if I could borrow a mixer. They brought down a mixer and then, when the guy saw the size of what I was doing, he got out his calculator and figured out how many mixes I'd have to do. And he said every one of the heads would take something like 14 mixes. So he said they'd do it for me. They also have huge big sheds where I did all the grinding and carving."
The piece was then moved to Birr, courtesy of Offaly County Council. "I was looking for a place to put it on temporary exhibition," says Conway. "My daughter's friends happened to be doing some painting in the castle; they showed photographs to Lord Rosse and he said 'Sure, why not?' Rita Kelly, who's a poet and the arts officer for Offaly, used to work for a transport company. Within an hour she had these big lorries that had been used for moving bridges and stuff - and we were off."
Having journeyed across Ireland, "Theatre" has been at Birr Castle for two summers. From Conway's point of view, however, it would really be better if it were to find a permanent home. And she'd really like to sell the piece called "Journey to the Celestial Mountain" because then she could cast the beautiful clay face - which, in the finished work, will lie half-submerged in the earth, approached through a labyrinth of earthen walls. "I'm not going to cast it until I sell it," says Conway. "But it's a piece I'm very happy with." Like much of her work it is inspired by oriental sculpture. "Eastern and Western art have very different attitudes," she says. "When you look at huge Buddhas there's this feeling coming off them which is very - they're very calming. It's very different to western sculpture, which often says 'Look at me, aren't I wonderful, I was a general and I slaughtered thousands'. I'm drawn to art that isn't about glorifying somebody, or their deeds - or even the cult of the artist, which a very Renaissance thing. I feel more at home with a tradition in which you don't know who the artist is.
"Western art is very ideas-driven: I want my art to be about feelings. There are certain pieces of sculpture which make me feel faint when I see them - they have such a profound effect on me. The Egyptian room in the British Museum, for instance. Or Indian sculptures. The people who made those things are nameless, yet I feel a connection to them. Even though they lived 4,000 years ago in a completely different culture, when they looked at the bottom of a nose they saw exactly the same shapes that I see."
Conway's bay in the Fire Station is, at the moment, totally taken up with a large brick-and-earth construction which will, one day, be a sculpture called "A Place For Feeling Good In". Sounds like something many of us could do with, right now. "Well, my ideas are always to do with what's going on in my own life," says Conway. "Which is always fairly universal because everybody else goes through the same things. This piece has to do with the way the whole world is at the moment - there's just so much to deal with. If you watch the news you get incredibly stressed out. But there are certain places that, when you walk into them, are calming."
"A Place For Feeling Good In" will consist of a circular green space enclosing several sleeping figures, faces just discernible beneath the curves of the hills.
What, you may be tempted to ask, does it all mean? Conway smiles. She can easily give "explanations" for her works - such as the following note in a sales brochure which, she hopes, will result in a buyer for "Theatre" and "Journey To The Celestial Mountain". The latter is, says the note, "connected to the idea of journeys that will never be made except in the imagination, and to our belief that we can somehow influence the shape of the future ..."
But these, in the end, are just words. You can't touch words the way you can touch sculpture. "People often ask what a piece is about and they think they want to know - but I'm not sure that they really do," she says. "And when you've worked on something for two years you've thought about so many things during that time that any explanation will really be pretty facile. But if you don't want to know what it's about, you can still enjoy coming up and feeling the nose. Or you can say, 'Oh, look, it's inside out'. Or, 'I wonder why she didn't put eyeballs in' ..."