Hungary for enlargement and spreading the word

IRELAND was once described by WB Yeats as "the Hungary of the West". A century on, sculptor Maria Lugossy also believes there are many similarities between the two countries.

"You were oppressed by Britain," she says. "We were oppressed by a succession of countries: Turkey, Austria and, most recently, the Soviet Union. Your people went all over the world, so did ours. You kept your own culture; so, too, did we."

Although she was born in 1950 and has borne witness to her country's many upheavals, it is difficult to imagine Maria Lugossy having ever been oppressed by anything. Since graduating from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1975, she has created a prodigious quantity of work, exhibited internationally and won numerous awards for her sculpture in Britain, Germany, France, Japan and America.