Island - British Embassy - Dublin

Extract from STILLS FROM SCULPTURE

While working on Slate Frieze I was invited to propose a work to be installed in front of the new British Embassy in Dublin. By coincidence the entrance path is the same 21 metre length as Slate Frieze and I made Island a second work designed to be visually accumulative but this time in walking to and from the building. The project came when the building programme was already well advanced, I found a common language with the architects and used the formal structure provided by Allies and Morrison as my starting point. Island might be seen as a series of details, an assembly of images forever changing with the weather and viewing-point.

A slate boulder is situated in the grassy area to the right of the path as you leave the lodge on the Merrion Road and walk towards the Embassy. The boulder is not visible from the street, nor are the reflecting levels of the moat. After rain the island in the moat becomes a highly reflective plane hovering above the water-surface. A carved tracery that appeared in the boulder like a spring of water flows invisibly underground to re-emerge in the surface of the island, directing the passage of rainwater and changing visibility as it dries. As you continue to walk towards the island, the carving appears to shift and lengthen, Through the water you see an elongated oval deeply black and smooth on the pale granite floor of the moat, an echo of the distant boulder in the grass.
The slate for the island was chosen for its markings, a record of its own making, and reorganised in the studio in London to run through the island like a river. The carving had been planned using strips of paper to represent engraved lines and mirrors to envisage the effects of perspective and foreshortening of the site. Once installed the water began its equivalent flow down the channels on both sides of the island

It is a quiet work suggestive of a quiet mutual presence in hope of peace at this time in history and for the future.

In Dublin and later on in Sunken Courtyard in Shoreditch the weather is drawn in to the work by reflections in the slate and the moat, the wet surfaces mirroring the sky and the changing weather. Here you might see something beneath the surface or within the slate which might in turn trigger a memory of something half seen before.

The day that Island was completed I saw two men leaning over the bridge deep in conversation. My friend caught their words as they discussed it. Anna Livia Plurabelle they said. Excited, he came over to me. Finnegan's Wake he said. More recently I rediscovered those passages which I had forgotten my father reading to us as children (words he loved to read because he so enjoyed imitating Joyce's voice) and found 500 names of rivers embedded in their text. I had never understood the words but remembered the sounds of them as he read them to me again. Had they subliminally crept into the work or were they inherent in the place, the place that is Dublin and the meaning of the word that is Dublin (they tell me ) is black stone.

The thoughts these Dubliners brought to the work were the best response I could have wished for. Had they not been Irish or had they not been in Dublin, the work could not have sparked off this response. I felt I had tuned into the place and that the work had begun a life of its own.

© Susanna Heron 1999