Cork Film Festival: Seamus Murphy has a reputation set in stone

Cork sculptor Séamus Murphy is the subject of a new film, writes Colette Sheridan.

CORK-BORN sculptor Séamus Murphy, the subject of a new documentary to be screened at the Cork Film Festival, had a favourite story about a child that frequented his studio in Blackpool, observing the master carving a bust out of a block of stone. When the sculpture was complete, the child asked how Murphy knew the head was in there all the time.

“Seamus loved the child seeing the profundity of the work,” says Padraig Trehy, the director of the documentary, Seamus Murphy: A Quiet Revolution. The ‘revolution’ in the title of the film refers to Murphy trying to find an Irish visual language. “He was trying to get away from the classical tradition, wanting to give people something closer to them. Using stone, he was creating a link back to the distant past and at the same time, looking forward by creating monuments and carvings that would long outlive him.”