Sculpture - Academic Staff Profiles

Louise Walsh, DipFA, MA(University of Ulster)
Lecturer, Sculpture

Born in Co Cork in 1963, Louise Walsh graduated from the Crawford School of Art and Design in 1984 She received her MA Fine Art from the University of Ulster in 1986.

Walsh took up a part-time lecturing position in Sculpture at Limerick School of Art & Design in 1989 and was appointed Lecturer in 1994. She has taught and consulted extensively in Universities and Art Colleges in Ireland and the UK.

She taught in a part time position in Sculpture at NCAD from 1996, and Walsh was appointed as fulltime in 2002.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally. ’Sounding the Depths’ a collaborative video installation with Pauline Cummins toured to Kunstlerhaus, Graz, Austria. The Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Street Level Gallery, Glasgow. And the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston, USA.

Walsh’s practice is more often located in public spaces or contexts and is negotiated through the participation of various constituencies or communities.

Her public art commissions include Integrated Public Artworks 2001 situated around the entrance of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. An installation in public walkway Pier 4A, Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport, London, 1994, and Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, 1992, Belfast.

Current projects include a participatory public art project with staff to be sited around the Emergency Department in James Hospital. A public artwork and installation commemorating the women workers of the shirt factory industry in Derry, and a participatory project, with residents from the Cois Mara public authority housing estate in Rosslare, for Wexford County Council.

The 40 metre long boundary sculpture commission at the Luas Stop, James Hospital. Includes bronze sculptures done by teenagers from the James street area on a linked project, ably supported in workshops by student volunteer mentors from the sculpture department.

Research Interests

Research based primarily in the arena of public art with a focus on the production of sculptural interventions sited in publicly used space. Walsh has a particular interest in developing artwork through dialogue, process based, participatory, and collaborative as well as educational practices.

Projects

2004-2006: Boundary Sculpture at Luas Stop, James Hospital, Dublin 8

Teenagers from the James Street Area with their sculptures which will be installed at Luas stop at James Hospital. worked with artist Louise Walsh and a team of volunteers from 2nd year sculpture department.

Walsh was commissioned to designed a 40 metre long art work as a boundary feature between Mary Aikenhead flats and the hospital’s property. She decided to create a series of seats on both sides of the existing low wall. The curving railing fulfils its brief of a boundary, but provides an equality of consideration and usage on either side. Read more about this project...

2006: Emergency Department Commission, James Hospital, Dublin 8.
Integrated artworks made in collaboration with Staff (Budget; €45,000)

Proposal for percent for art in James Hospital‘s Emergency Department. To be completed in April 2007.

Walsh devised this work to make artworks integrated into the fabric of the building in a range of sites that mediate the triage process for patients and the public. This work advocates on behalf of staff in the Emergency department and will be made in consultation with them.

2005- 2006: Public Art Project for a housing estate in Rosslare.
Wexford County Council Percent for Art Scheme (Budget €35,000)

Rosslare project - stone delivery.
Photo: Emily Burl

Rosslare project - working on images for the stones.
Photo: Emily Burl

This project is located in a public Authority Housng Estate in Rosslare will centre on workshops and events that are developed in collaboration with the residents who have just moved in. There is a newly built Community centre on the estate and the art workshops, parties, visits by community activists, landscape architects and other professionals are an attempt to open up an object based sculpture commission into a project which puts forward a model of community based organisation to the residents of the estate and the locality.

Large pieces of local granite boulders have been delivered to the site. The art workshops will focus on devising texts and images by the residents to be sandblasted onto the stone as well as the positioning of these pieces.

Walsh has extended this public art commission in Rosslare by devising a programme to facilitate paid residencies for two NCAD 4th year sculpture student graduates; Paula Mc Carthy and Niamh White from Co Wexford. Both will have a studio space for six weeks in the Estate’s community centre, and will assist the lead artist for 6 days on the main project. The graduates get a wage, a budget for materials and a small catalogue each.. (Extra budget is €12,000 for post graduate element also funded by Wexford CoCo)

2006: Public Sculpture Installation to be sited in the Waterside, Derry.
(Budget; £100,000 stg)

Model of work to be installed in October 2006.

The piece comprises of three steel sculptural forms (from 9m to 6.4 m high), a land art component and a participatory project with local groups feeding into the sculpture. The work celebrates the city’s shirt factory industry and its women workers. There is a significant participatory element to the project with local groups of women working with the artist.

Walsh is also collaborating with the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry for the duration of the public art project, where recording and archiving of Walsh’s conversations with the women shirt factory workers will be housed. The Verbal Arts Centre will also publish a book on the process of the making and siting of the sculpture.

Circuit, 2003, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast

Left and right: Circuit, 2003, Bronze snake and mechanism. Sandblasted texts and drawings, all situated on columns at the entrance to the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast

This work for the Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast, is an installation situated at the entrance.

The snake on the staff is the symbol of western medicine and healing, Walsh wanted the viewer to have the chance to grasp this huge serpent by the tail and be able to make it move, take control physically on entering the hospital.

Her intention was to make artwork that the viewer has to walk around and use their body in the 'reading' of the pieces, it being an interactive rather than a passive experience. She conceived of the spiralling text piece for the corner columns, the writing sandblasted onto these twined columns engage the viewer in a kind of textual puzzle; you have to circumnavigate both to read the poem. Walsh commissioned the poet Martin Mooney to write a poem that took a very strict form: six lines, of the same length.

A wall built against the columns had to be punctured to allow the viewer to walk around the piece, Walsh designed a balcony rail to extend the spacethat connects with other DNA drawings sand blasted onto two of the columns.

Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, 1992

Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker, 1992. Bronze 6’6” high. Sited outside entrance to train station on Great Victoria Street, Belfast.

Originally commissioned by the Dept. of the Environment, Belfast for a new square behind the Crown Bar. The commission brief was to figuratively reflect the social history of the locality, described only in terms of prostitution.

Walsh was not willing to represent women’s experience only in those terms.

This proposal involved an alternative take on commemorative figurative public

sculpture; in particular monuments to the unknown soldier. Focusing the experience of women in the labor force and in particular issues like the lack of equal pay for women and fact that workers in the home receive no wages, she embedded statistics, text and symbolic objects into the surface of the bronze figures, highlighting the contribution of women’s work to society which is often unpaid or badly paid.

This became the underlying context regarding women and prostitution. However the sculpture became the subject of a bizarre media and political controversy and was banned from public property by Belfast City Council. The work was subsequently re-commissioned by a private developer and finally sited in Great Victoria Street, out side the Train Station.

Download: Louise Walsh Curriculum Vitae (PDF 108k)