'It's almost like they make themselves': Eilis O’Connell on her Happenstance exhibition at the Glucksman, UCC
Eilis O'Connell at The Glucksman in Cork. Picture: Alison Miles/OSM
Eilis O’Connell is one of Ireland’s foremost sculptors, and HAPPENSTANCE, her new exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork, showcases an extraordinary variety of her work in bronze, steel, stone and wood, along with a selection of her drawings.
The title, O’Connell says, is a reflection of how so many of her creations come about through happy accidents. Her sculptures are mostly abstract, but there is clearly an organic influence, particularly in the tall slender pieces, such as and .
“I love plants,” she says. “I love nature. I love the environment. I feel like all these things kind of flow through me and the work comes out. I never have trouble making things. It's almost like they make themselves. And that's how comfortable I am with it.”
O’Connell was born in Derry in 1953, and lived in Donegal until the age of 10, when her family moved down to Cork. She enrolled in the Crawford School of Art in 1970, and studied sculpture under the late John Burke, working predominantly in steel.
Always ambitious, she went on to study at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and then undertook two research fellowships, at the British School in Rome and PSI in New York. Awarded a two-year residency at Delfina Studios in London in 1988, she stayed on in Britain for many years, working on large-scale public commissions and showing at the Venice, Paris and Sao Paolo Biennales.
O’Connell returned to Ireland in the early 2000s, after her partner’s passing, establishing a large studio in a former dairy in Inniscarra, Co Cork. “It was lovely coming back and living in the countryside, having been in the middle of London,” she says.
“It’s very healing. I used to crave nature when I lived in the city, and I was so thrilled that I could have land, and could grow things. There's even parts of my pieces now that are made from branches and other plants that grow here. It’s like the landscape presents me with materials.”
Happenstance is the third major exhibition of O’Connell’s work there has been in this country in the past four years. A Family of Things ran at the FE McWilliam in Co Armagh in the summer of 2023, while Visual Carlow hosted In the Roundness of Being in the spring of 2024. The latter exhibition included a massive steel sculpture, over 21 metres in length, called , which O’Connell intended as a meditation on ideas of refuge and shelter, particularly in the context of forced migration.
“Visual Carlow was probably the only gallery in Britain or Ireland that could show a work that size,” says O’Connell. “That’s why I made it; I might never again get to exhibit in a space as large as that.”
When the exhibition ended, O’Connell took the sculpture home. “It comes apart in three pieces,” she says, “and it’s now out in the garden at my studio. I have an acre of land, and it's completely full of sculptures. It's like having my own exhibition, but it’s always on.”
O’Connell has accumulated far more work than can be accommodated in her garden. “Some of my pieces I’ve had for 30 years,” she says. “That's the problem with being a sculptor; what you don't realise starting out is that you're going to have huge storage issues.
She has recently completed a number of major commissions in Dublin, including , a mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture at Mary Lavin Place at Wilton Park. “That nearly killed me, it was so hard to make,” she says. “It was so risky what I did, but they knew I was doing something very different that nobody had done before. And I got it done.”
More recently, she designed a set of 14 metre-long gates on George’s Quay. “I worked with a great team of architects on that. I did a ton of drawings, and I knew I’d cracked it. Then it was just a matter of how do we make this three-dimensional, and how do we get the gates to slide perfectly?
"I love working with teams like that. I mean, the fact that we could share screens is amazing. I didn't have to keep running up to Dublin all the time, which I usually do.”
O’Connell is used to working with teams to realise her larger projects. “I work with foundries in England. I have people here in Ireland who work in epoxy resin. And I have stone people I work with in Italy.
"They trust me and I trust them. It’s very hard to build up that trust. But I’m not a messer. If I say I can do something, I will do it, and it will be done perfectly. I’m confident to say that now after all these years.”
The British writer and curator Jon Wood is currently writing a book on O’Connell’s career. “Jon came over to open the exhibition at the Glucksman,” she says. “He used to work for the Henry Moore Foundation, and he specialises in sculpture. We’ve spent hundreds of hours talking, and he’ll distil that down.
"We’ve gone through my old notebooks, right back to my college days, and it’s incredible to look back and see the consistency. I might have had an idea 20 years ago, and be working on that now. The book will be published by Lund Humphries, but it’s a long process. That might not happen for another year.”
O’Connell is also considering what will eventually become of her personal collection of work. “This is a huge worry,” she says. “You know, is it going to end up in a skip? You have to be realistic, but I would love for it to be shown somewhere, with people who will take care of it, and in a place where people can easily go and see it. I wouldn't just give it to anybody. It has to be a trustworthy person or institution.”
For now, however, she is simply focused on making. “My next show will be at the Solomon Gallery in Dublin. I don’t even know what work I’ll select for that yet. I’ll probably do something for the RHA Annual Exhibition as well. I’d like to do a bigger piece for that. I'm working on something in the studio at the moment, and hopefully that will be finished in time.
“Apart from that, there’s plenty of other big pieces I need to finish. I’m always working, I’m always doing commissions. There’s never a lull, really. I just like to get things right.”
- Eilis O’Connell, HAPPENSTANCE runs at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork until April 12. Further information: glucksman.org, eilisoconnell.com
