17 May 2025 (Please note change of date from 10 May)

Ms Sarah Kelleher, Lecturer, MTU CCAD:
‘Sculpture in Transformation; Irish art since the 1980s’

‘Land’, Siobhan Hapaska, 1998 © Kerlin Gallery

The 1980s mark beginning of a distinct cultural shift in Irish art practice, when artists began to embrace new media techniques and to confront their audience with the presence of the artist’s body – advances that were largely pioneered by women. This tectonic shift, in the words of Alice Maher, opened up ‘a whole new field’ for art practice, one less hidebound by tradition and unburdened by the weight of the past.[1] Increasingly politicised by the Troubles in the North as well as the assertion and consolidation of conservative values  in the Republic, a generation of women turned to sculpture to engage with ideas of gender, identity, territory and marginality in process based works that prioritised a haptic or felt rather than simply optic materiality. This talk will focus on the material complexity and inventiveness that characterise ambitious sculptural practice in Ireland at the end of the 20th Century, foregrounding the ways in which an expanded approach to materials, motivated and informed by feminist politics, in turn activates an expanded set of spectatorial relations. Proceeding by means of case studies, this session will position a selection of sculptural objects and installations as potently oppositional, critical, and insistently material interventions within a historical and cultural moment preoccupied by transformation and national identity.

[1] Interview with Alice Maher, 14/03/18

Sarah Kelleher lectures in Art History at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and is a Government of Ireland scholar, currently finishing her PhD on contemporary Irish sculpture with the History of Art Department in UCC. Her research focuses Irish art since the 1990s with an emphasis on sculptural practice, queer theory and phenomenology. As co-founder of Pluck Projects along with Dr. Rachel Warriner, Sarah has co-curated the exhibitions Rachel Fallon’s The Mother City project (2022); Padraig Spillane’s define silver lining v2.0 (2022); Jessica Akerman’s Cork Caryatids (2021)  and Alice Maher: Vox Materia (2018).  Pluck Projects are currently organising a series of symposia for the RHA in Dublin which consider the relation between Irish artists and the institution as the Academy celebrates  its 200th anniversary. Sarah also nurtures an independent curatorial practice and is the curator of Kevin Mooney: Revenants, IMMA 2022 and Taking Form: Students of the Year 1973-77 – Maud Cotter, Eilis O’Connell, Vivienne Roche at Lavit Gallery 2023