A legacy carved in stone

Seán Lynch celebrates the O’Shea brothers’ craftsmanship.

ONE of the most striking buildings in Trinity College is the Museum Building. Built in a Venetian style in the 1850s, it is considered a landmark of Victorian architecture.

But by far the most delightful aspect of the building is less spectacular, and draws not on architectural history, but on nature. It is the idiosyncratic stone carvings that decorate it — showing foliage, flowers, shamrock sprigs and, among them, birds, snakes, frogs, squirrels. A teeming menagerie emerging from stone, fluidly and lightly carved.

The craftsmen behind this were a pair of brother stone carvers, John and James O’Shea, of Ballyhooley, Co Cork. Their remarkable versatility was an outgrowth of an artisan tradition — truly a native style outside the mainstream of European sculpture. Later, the pair would work on a university museum building in Oxford. Those two buildings form the mainstay of a small, yet effective, installation by Seán Lynch about the largely-unsung brothers, which is currently showing at the Hugh Lane, Dublin City Gallery.

Lynch’s inspiration for the work builds on the concept he explored successfully in A Rocky Road, his show at Cork’s Crawford Gallery that examined the Irish public and media reception of art and how that evolved over decades. How art is received still occupies him.

“Looking at art in the public realm, I started thinking about this and relating back to the O’Sheas’ work. I was aware of their work for 10-15 years; I thought, in some ways, it needed to be reintroduced with a new vocabulary, with the knowledge we have now, backdated to their practice,” said Lynch.

That vocabulary is to the fore in Lynch’s slideshow of images of the O’Sheas’ work, accompanied by an impressionistic, imaginative, sympathetic and at times polemical narration, read by Gina Moxley. The text, says Lynch, is not an attempt at academic accuracy. More, it tries to put the observer into the O’Sheas’ shoes, their time, their world of inspiration.

“I like how certain moments can occur, but there might not be the language to valorise them until a later time, so a lot of the work is transposing what happened in history to now. But I am happy to be wrong, too. This showing at the Hugh Lane is about opening up the conversation again. The work will travel to Oxford, so it will be updated again, and I have more research going on that can get incorporated into it.”

We certainly do valorise originality now more than was the case during the O’Sheas’ time. A fascinating example of this difference comes in the attempts by their English, Victorian paymasters to cast their work methods — which involved working from life, using flowers picked on morning walks as models, rather than expensively-rendered artificial miniatures — as examples of “efficiency”. Their fluid style gives such naturalness to their plants and animals, and is seen as a way of gaining greater output for lesser input, casting their methods in the language of the Industrial Revolution.

But even then, the pair rebelled against the constraints of their time. One incident related in Lynch’s narrative concerns their carving of contentious, possibly Darwinian-inspired figures on the facade of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, leading to quarrels with the authorities. “It’s a defiance that should resonate,” says Lynch.

Lynch’s show, entitled A blow-by-blow account of stone carving in Oxford, comprises two rooms, of which the slideshow is the second. What greets the viewer first, in a room that focuses on the process of stone carving, is a pile of chippings at one’s feet, and behind a carved monkey, with a knowing expression: An outsider, aloof and wild in the gallery space. Around him are photographed the stages of his creation out of a block of stone — heavy, blank, unwieldy. Yet, here is this lithe spirit emerged from it. The monkey is by the sculptor Stephen Burke, says Lynch, adding: “We spent a lot of time looking at these in Oxford and Dublin.”

Lynch is fascinated by the idea of the translocation of culture. He sees the O’Sheas as analogous to the bards of Munster, who trained in schools before travelling, “keeping the culture moving”. After the Cromwellian wars, says Lynch, “that enrichment of people going from place to place died away”. But the transplanting culture lives on, often unnoticed. The very fact you can so easily miss the O’Sheas’ defining contribution to what would otherwise be the Museum Building’s simple Venetian import is part of the point: It is missed because it is so part of the city. Citing the philosopher Manuel De Landa, Lynch concludes that “cities are biological, and so is the public who live in them. So, things grow and fall and regenerate in a fluid way”.

nA blow-by-blow account of stone carving in Oxford is at the Hugh Lane until September 29. See www.hughlane.ie.