Sync -  2019 - Bronze edition of 1.

Sync is cast from the original in Elm, Carbon Sync - 200 x 170 x 50cms €60,000 The bronze casting is mounted on a steel plinth 450 x 500 x 500 cm with concealed castors for hard surfaces. weight approx 250kg.

Fundamental to my sculptural process is an awareness of gravity as a persistent presence around us in the physical world: ordering and governing it. This awareness extends past considerations of balance and form to the far reaching extent that it becomes topical and even titular, being referred to in a series of works, Gravity Swimmers. These works are perhaps, as an expression, notional that gravity is an atheistic God surrogate, if one metaphysically considers that gravity is the universal medium through which we swim. This is the sculptural means for his expression of a scientific understanding that geologically and astronomically gravity imposes order on what would otherwise be a chaotic universe. 

It is the invisibility that shapes the planets and fuses stars, maintains orbits, and governs galaxies. 

Having some metaphysical equivalence to, and conversion with gravity, is medium; the very stuff that life is supported and surrounded by, air, water, amniotic fluid. It is this preoccupation that brought to life the series of works called buoyed and a-shebuoyed (a-shebuoyed is derived from amoeboid). Anthrobuoyed in Elm and exhibited together with Carbon Sync references the Anthropocene.

“Each individual ‘Buoyed’ is nuanced by some other additional element. In the case of Carbon Sync the peculiarity is the material itself and so gives it, its name. As a way of explaining this: He says, he has used stone more often in the past for sculpture but on this occasion is using wood, made primarily of Carbon, and coated in graphite, an allotrope of Carbon and of its human subject also (in reality of course) made primarily of Carbon.  Phonetically, the two words used together, typically mean Carbon sink. The timber of the forest, in a collective sense, is a storage sink of Carbon but when it is used in a building its life as a sink is prolonged (so long as the forest continues to be maintained) ‘By using the elm in the sculpture’ he says ‘I have likely prolonged the materials life yet more as a carbon sink’ The sculpture is infused with meanings around climate change, sea levels and buoyancy, life preservation and survival, Godness, levity, gravity, and an un-didactic suggestion that collectively we fail to take serious matters that effect our very survival. 

The words are important. They are like a web that has an unknown but definite shape. They interact and present new meanings to each other when they are introduced to the neighbourhood.  Gravity as an organiser of the cosmos relates to the notion of God.  Buoyed and a-shebuoyed are meaningful as suspended in this medium of Gravity” simply another story with levitation   (deity fashioned) as a way of evidencing gravity whilst framing it within a little levity.   

 Customarily He works with what appears to be an intractable material, stone, however he returns time and again to the elemental practice of drawing with the chisel on its surface. He has learned to adapt this approach to working with timber. In a similar way, finding an equivalence to the the stone and chisel, where like the wood and chisel they provide him with an immediacy similar to pencil and charcoal on paper but with the added facility, through repeated marking by removal with the chisel, of drawing the rough hewn surface of the rock or wood into deliberate form.

He has exhibited throughout Ireland and the UK, and in Paris, Ghent, Basle, and Los Angelas. He is an elected member of the Royal Hibernian Academy RHA, and of Aosdána