Go on.
Speaker 2:Hi. This is Materially Speaking, where artists tell their stories through the materials they choose. In this series, we're in a community in Northern Italy, where artists have been carving marble since Michelangelo first came here 500 years ago, to source marble from the local quarries. Artists come not only to benefit from the range of marble available here, but also to work with the exceptionally skilled artisans. With 30 miles north of Pisa, sandwiched between sea and pine forests on one side, and olive groves rising up the hillsides into the Apuan Alps on the other.
Speaker 2:We're near a town called Pietrasanta, nicknamed Little Athens because of its tradition for carving marble. Today, I'm in Studio Sem, founded by master marble carver Ghelardini in the 19 fifties. In 1963, a papal edict, Vatican 2, pretty much put a stop to the carving of ecclesiastical work that sustained the artisans of this area. Sem Ghelardini in the 19 fifties. To come to realize their work here with the help of skilled artisans.
Speaker 2:Sculptors such as Henry Moore, Georges Henry Adame, Juan Miro, and later on, Cesar and Helene Blumenfeld, all came to realize their work at his studio. This was a huge turning point for the type of carving done in this area. Sem's reputation for his passionate support for his artist is continued today by the current studio head, Kiera MacMartin, and Sem's son, Pier Angelo, who lead a tight team of artisans. I'm sitting in the peach orchard behind the studio, overlooking a space where artists can polish their work by hand. Nearby, marble is stored for new projects, and in the background, you can hear the sounds of the busy studio.
Speaker 2:Today, I'm talking to Eilish O'Connell, an Irish artist who works in many materials, from cotton and mirror polish stainless steel to bronze and epoxy resin. She is here because of a particular commission that she wants to create in marble.
Speaker 1:I'm Eilish O'Connell. I work in Cork in the south of Ireland. I was born in the north of Ireland in Derry in the fifties, and then we moved to the south when I was about 10. And I went to a school of art locally in Cork, and then I went to art college in Boston. Then I got, a fellowship and in British school at Rome.
Speaker 1:And I stayed in education as long as I could, because I knew how difficult it would be to survive as an artist. So it was like a sheltered work workshop.
Speaker 2:And what sort of art were you doing? Were you doing, painting, drawing,
Speaker 1:or No. Well, in Ireland, at that point in time in the seventies, there was only one course, and it was to how to it was to be an art teacher. And, so, in fact, you had to learn everything. It was a very antiquated system, a bit like it was here in Italy. Immediately, I knew I just wanted to always be an artist and, but the reality is you have to train for something, so I had to train to be a teacher.
Speaker 1:I did get all my exams because they were practical, which was brilliant. Got all my exams in about the 1st 2 years, and then I was free to mess around. And they were changing the course at that point. They brought in some teachers from England to modernize the system, So we were open to all these influences, like steel, Anthony Caroll, like one of our teachers had worked for Brian Neil in London. So there's a connection there already with Saint Martin's and all that.
Speaker 1:So it was steel. My first attraction, really, was steel. Learning to weld was a thrill.
Speaker 2:What did you do in steel? What were your first sort
Speaker 1:of well, first of all, you have to learn to weld the steel and how to use it, so there's a skill in that. And because it was art college, we were sent to a technical school where they train you to weld, like, underwater and, you know, crazy stuff like that. Or, you know, they test x-ray the wells and all that. So it was really high-tech, but it was more than what I needed. But it was actually great in terms of learning the skill, so I was very good at the technical side of it.
Speaker 1:And then I was just like like David Smith in America and Anthony Caro. I used scrap scrap steel. But then later, I went to school. I went to, college in America, and then I was exposed to, like, fiberglass and a lot of fur materials, like and I discovered Nagoshi, people like that, and Richard Serra, of course. But then I love I just love experimenting as a natural thing.
Speaker 1:I'm a real messer. You know, I like to see what a material can do and play with it. I didn't want to get pinned down, so I I branched out from stone from steel to other materials, bronze and, resins and all kinds of stuff, really.
Speaker 2:So what took you to Boston?
Speaker 1:Well, you see, in Ireland, there was this great thing of if you're a student, you would get a visa called the j one visa, and you went every summer to the states, and everybody did this. And you got a you got some money as well to go. So I just went to New York when I was 18, and then I went to Boston, and then I went to the Midwest. So every single summer, I went abroad and kinda saw as much art as possible, got crappy old jobs. But it was a brilliant experience.
Speaker 1:You know, it was kind of amazing. So I was very drawn to American artists and just the scale of art. You know, Richard Serra, I mean, the scale of that. So scale has really always been my thing. I'm obsessed with scale, even from when I was very young.
Speaker 1:Like, I make a small thing, and I think, God, if it could be as big as the landscape or, you know, because I like to be outside myself. I mean, galleries to me are rooms. You know, they're just internal spaces. So I like to be outside in the air, and the sculptures has to exist like every other thing. It has to just have some sort of relevance to the place, and people have to look after it as well.
Speaker 1:And it's everybody can see it. It's not like a gallery.
Speaker 2:And how, important is it for you to know where it's going to be placed as
Speaker 1:as you make it? It's it's really weird, that question, actually, because, like, in the past, I have sold pieces to, you know, people, large companies and things. And if you're selling through a dealer, they don't want you to know where it goes, which I find absolutely incredible. They'll do everything to hide where it's going because I think the context of where you put a sculpture is so important. That's why I'm drawn to putting a thing outside, because I know it's gonna be there forever, you know?
Speaker 1:And, hopefully, it's going to be maintained. Now that's another huge issue. People do not maintain sculpture. They think it's it it cleans itself. Well, actually, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It's like every other material in the world. So you have to maintain it. It's my latest bug there, maintenance.
Speaker 2:It's so tell me more about maintenance and how one does it and how
Speaker 1:you get people to Well, when I worked in London, I worked in London for 17 years, and I I worked with good public art agencies, and they know about this kind of thing. And so I would write in maintenance contracts into my into the commission, and they would too. And everybody would sign it. It would be fine. And the next thing is you'd pass your sculpture, and it would be absolutely filthy, like, say, something in London where the traffic is dreadful.
Speaker 1:You know? And I'd go into the building, and I'd say, my piece hasn't been maintained, da da da. And and I would say it was commissioned by the contemporary art society, and they'd go, well, it's owned now by some German company. The building's been sold. You know?
Speaker 1:So it's all that sort of stuff. You know? So, like, I can't go around every piece and clean it myself. How about other materials that you've worked with? Let's because bronze.
Speaker 1:Bronze is the biggest issue because, well, the patinas are very good if they're kept properly. You know, Henry Moore's in London, they're washed every 6 weeks and cleaned every you know? And I have a piece in Newcastle, which is, mirror polish stainless steel, and they clean it every 2 weeks. One of the things in commissions is maintenance free material, and I have to immediately say, no such thing. Sorry, guys.
Speaker 1:You know? Actually, the most maintenance free is mirror polish stainless steel because you still see the you know, it's like, it just gets dirty. It's you know, it's not whereas a patina, say, if a bird poos in a patina, it starts to eat into the bronze. It etches it, and it goes lime green. You know?
Speaker 1:So Does that to my car. Yeah. And yeah. I mean, if you think of it, a car you leave your car unwashed even for 6 months, it's hideous. It's the same as sculpture, but why don't people get that?
Speaker 1:And think about they're gonna have to if they if they own it, they have to be responsible and and clean it. So that's I'm really particular about that. Another question that I, particular about that.
Speaker 2:Another question that I, has come up a couple of times is, both functionality and, artistically, of bases.
Speaker 1:So, like, you
Speaker 2:know, is it high enough that kids can't climb
Speaker 1:on it? It? Oh, gosh. It's a huge issue.
Speaker 2:So what's what's your take on bases?
Speaker 1:Well, okay. I spent my entire life resisting the plinth. The plinth is to me, it separated a person from the from this piece of sculpture. It was like, I'm up in a plinth. I'm really different, you know?
Speaker 1:So all my life, I've liked things lying down the ground, but, actually, it's not very practical. Things have to be pinned to the ground. But, say, a big piece, I like it to look like it just grew out of the ground, or it's it's just lying there. But in a in reality, you've got to pin it. And but sometimes I just pin 2 points, and then it looks like it's kinda floating.
Speaker 1:And I make the plinth myself. It becomes part of the piece, so it's just like the ground. When they're above human height, they're they're saying something completely different, you know, like monumental sculpture. It's on a very high plinth per bigger than a person because it's all about power. I feel it's about if you go into churches, it's like everything's elevated because, like, we're bigger and better than you, you know.
Speaker 1:It's this. But now I'm thinking now I think the plinth is actually very important, really. But then the thing about kids, you kinda mentioned that. I did. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, they're trouble, actually. They're trouble. And, like, they do inhibit you in the public realm. You know, if a kid can climb on something... or one of my first commission commissions in Ireland is in a place called Kinsale, and I did a huge piece in court in steel. I was really young at the time, and, there were these huge slopes of steel.
Speaker 1:They were rolled steel, and they were just kind of rolling into the ground. And I thought they were fabulous. You could just kinda slightly run up it and run you know, you'd fall down a little bit, but it was the time of BMX bikes. So the kids just loved these things. This is, like, the early eighties.
Speaker 1:So they got their BMX bikes, and they went up and down, you know, kind of, And I thought the tyre tracks were beautiful. I thought they were like drawings. This was like the public drawing of my piece. Layers of rubber on the court and were absolutely gorgeous, but that town became obsessed with the kids who were gonna kill themselves. Now children don't naturally kill themselves, so it became a huge thing.
Speaker 1:And then they decided they didn't like Corten, and it had to be painted. And it was just it was a disaster because at the time in Ireland, I didn't even know this. Art had no copyright. Would you believe that?
Speaker 2:So what did that mean? They could change it?
Speaker 1:It meant, actually, that the are the county architect who had given me full permission to make the piece, he decided it was dangerous. And he decided that the rust was not very nice. He and he what he did was at the end of the slopes, he put in ponds ponds of water. I was I just, like, I just cried.
Speaker 1:It was just awful. So he put in 3 ponds, not just 1, but 3, in a tiny area. He painted it, and he had water flowing down the slopes to stop the children going up it. And the of course, the ponds just filled with rubbish. You know?
Speaker 1:They looked ridiculously filled it was he changed the color, You know? And this was okay because there was no copyright. That's And I was going to take it to the courts, and then I realized, oh my god. I don't even they never ratified the Berne Convention in Ireland until very late.
Speaker 2:So it's changed now, has it?
Speaker 1:So so it's changed now. Yeah. It's changed now. Yeah. But, I mean, there's nothing I could do.
Speaker 1:Absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2:Gosh. That's frustrating.
Speaker 1:It was desperate, and I got terrible abuse in the public. Really bad.
Speaker 1:So that was when I went to I went to London then.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about materials then. So we're in, Sem Studios
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And near the Carrara marble fields.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what brought you here and when? About 10 years ago, Almuth Tebanoff, who works here a lot, she told me about this place. She said you'd absolutely love it. It would be amazing.
Speaker 1:But at the time, I was in London, and I was paying a fortune for my studio, and I could never get away. You know? And then I got this commission recently in Dublin, and it was inside a building. It was a very a a really interesting space. It was an atrium.
Speaker 1:And it it's funny now because buildings used to be all sort of white and light. Now they're going for they had living walls. I think just walls with just plants growing all over them. And they had a wooden floor, and it's because it's kind of surrounded by dark wood and the living walls. I just felt it needed something white, and immediately, I thought, stone.
Speaker 1:This has to be a white stone. Like, it'll just absorb all the light in the atrium, and I came up with an idea. And I started thinking about stone, and, usually, I'm just thinking freely with metal, with bronze. I can make whatever I want. And so I had to think really differently about gravity and weight, which I thought was very interesting.
Speaker 1:You know? And even now, having come here, I can think another bit a bit more differently because I'm seeing how they use the stone, and I feel I'm learning so much. Because I thought stone could do less than it can do.
Speaker 2:So, you said then that marble can do a lot more than you thought.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you expand on that? God, how would I explain this now? Okay. For instance, I saw these Helena Blumenfeld pieces that were going to Sweden, and I just they kinda blew my mind, because she's got these massive pieces of stone, and they're kinda stretching out over your head, like, 3 2 meters above you.
Speaker 1:And you're just going, oh, my god. And this is carved out of stone, these hollow shapes, because I love hollow shapes. Like, I make a lot of kinda cave like things. But she's got them coming out, like, pinched out. I mean, I just think they're incredible how how the stone can do that.
Speaker 1:And then, Pier Angelo in there is carving one of her smaller pieces, and I'm looking at the model and, like, how does he get into that little hollow? And it's not just it's like a little animal's tunnel. It's going way down and around, and you can see all this light and shade. And it's like, how does he get in there to do that with a power tool? You know?
Speaker 1:But they make their own power tools. I mean, they make their own little chisels. Here here, they would make their own little chisels to get into really incredible spaces that you couldn't even imagine getting a finger into. So, like, that's I'm just so excited about that now. I'm just going, oh my god.
Speaker 1:You know? So
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So, you started your work 2 months ago. Tell me how you do. How do you start from a piece? So you took the commission.
Speaker 2:You just
Speaker 1:go into the building, and I see I can see the piece in my head. Right? Kind of. Kind of. I have the concept, and I have this the idea.
Speaker 1:And then I come home, and I make all these models, and then I go back to the building. I think, oh, I don't know about that. And then I start changing and chopping, and then I go through permutations and combinations of every different idea, and I drive myself bonkers. I actually drive myself bonkers, and then I end up going back to the thing maybe that I first thought of. It's never easy.
Speaker 1:It's never easy. What do
Speaker 2:you make your models of?
Speaker 1:I make the models out of usually kinda jesmonite, which is a a it's a a bio resin. It's kinda like plaster, but it's more versatile. You can make it like clay or you can make it runny. You can paint it or wax. Sometimes I use wax.
Speaker 2:So you make your model Yeah. And then you come here. How about choosing the stone?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I went out with Keira, and we picked the stone, the whitest marble we could find.
Speaker 2:Where did he go?
Speaker 1:We went to this big place where the guy had a huge crane, and he had diamond ropes and things. So they you know, these diamond ropes, and they cut into the block to see if it's okay. And there was a tiny air bubble, but it was up we couldn't manage to get the sculpture in. You could you could that would be the excess stuff. I mean, it's a 10 ton block, and they're carving away 8 tons.
Speaker 2:And it'll be 2 tons
Speaker 1:in weight? Well, the whole thing, because it's in a building, so it has to come in under a certain weight. Because steel has this resilience. I mean, this is what's brilliant about steel. You can draw a line in steel, and it would just stand up, you know.
Speaker 1:That's what I always thought. It's like magic. It's like a magic material. So for the stone, it's more you have to consider things like gravity.
Speaker 2:And have you had a look at, a number of different marbles just because you're here?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, god. I'm out all the time looking at stones. I mean, Keira has a great collection of stone out in the field.
Speaker 2:And does it inspire you for other work?
Speaker 1:Oh, gosh. I'm going around taking pictures of all stone I want to use. Like, she says I'm like a kid in a candy store, and it's true.
Speaker 2:So what's your take on the area?
Speaker 1:I think the area is it's like heaven on earth, really. And just, like, the age of the place and just the feeling that people love the stone. The stone is everywhere. It's in every house. My the sink in the house I'm staying is is made of stone, and it's just it's it's just everywhere I go, there's something really nice to look at, something really beautiful.
Speaker 1:But it's it's a very special place. And like all the guys in there, they all had fathers working stone, and it just goes back generations. And it it's kinda in their blood, you know? So I think we could learn an awful lot.
Speaker 2:What about churches? Do you like going
Speaker 1:around churches? Yeah. Oh, the church is everything, isn't it? Like, it like, it's amazing. They had so much money.
Speaker 1:And, like, in in Lucca, where everybody was trying to build a tower bigger than the other place, I just thought, humanity doesn't change. Like, look at Trump Tower. You know? Like, it's always been the same. Why is it men are obsessed with large, tall towers?
Speaker 1:Like, the church, you can see the power of the church. Like, in Ireland, we felt it our entire lives, you know, the impression of the church. In Ireland, it was about repression, but here, the church seemed more celebratory. It was about celebrating, you know, whereas in Ireland, it was like about dehumanizing you. You know, it was about making you feel inferior.
Speaker 1:And it's really strange, the girl whose house I'm staying in. I met her by accident. And she said, oh, you're from Ireland? She said, my grandfather worked on the churches in Ireland, and he loved Ireland. Like, a lot of the the altars and things were made by Italians, and they came over to Ireland and and built them.
Speaker 2:I was just reading a piece that, I guess, was on your website. And I just wonder whether we might go back and talk about, your choices of materials because it's obviously a very important part of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Your work, and not everybody works that way.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Well, I suppose in Ireland, stone is really important. Like like I did my thesis on Newgrange, you know, that place. They didn't really carve the stones. They roughly shaped them, fit like Stonehenge or something.
Speaker 1:But they they carved the surface, and they carved spirals, and that's really a big deal. You know, they're 1,000 of years old. So I I love archaeology. They created this this there's a place. It's just full of these passage graves and tombs, and they made the domes over them.
Speaker 1:But this one, Newgrange, it's you go down into the passage, and it's a cruciform shape. It's before Christianity. And in the middle of it, there's kind of a rough stone bowl. And and just at the entrance, there's a little slit made with just 2 stones. And on the the shortest day of the year, 21st December, the sun at sunrise goes right through that slit and shines into the center of this bowl.
Speaker 1:That that's incredible. That's Earth art. You know? Like, that was, you know, 3000 BC. And I just thought, like, that that's always fascinated me because to to me, that's sculpture.
Speaker 1:And these things are all over Ireland, and, you know, we have such reverence for these things. Like, it's incredible. I mean, I I think I love what I love is I love learning about how to use materials. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to become totally brilliant at working with them, which a lot of artists just perfect one material, But I I just get I have to find out more and more about different things, and I like to learn. I'm learning all the time about new things.
Speaker 1:It's a challenge. You know? Keeps me interested. So stone. What else can I say, really?
Speaker 1:I'm kind of obsessed with materials, and I do know a lot about materials. So
Speaker 2:What's your favorite?
Speaker 1:Oh, it's like asking a person, what's your favorite child?
Speaker 2:So thanks to Eilish O'Connell. You can see her work on her website at eilishoconnell.com, and follow her on Instagram, eilishoconnell_sculptor. For photographs of all the work discussed in this series, follow our Instagram, or visit our website, materially speaking.com, and join our mailing list to hear about upcoming shows.