Sculpture in the Parklands
2002-2010
Alan Counihan (Ireland)
My goal was to create a work which serves as a visual and physical entrance into a particular landscape, one within which the "passage" through dark matter into the light can be physically felt. A trench cut into an existing turf bank, floored with rail track, lined with sleepers. Beyond the passage three vertical rails reach skyward. Beyond these, a trail into the forest.
Passage
2009
Alan Counihan has referenced the permanence of land in ancestral cultural identity with earlier in situ sandstone sculptures such as Prayerhouse #2, The Shelter of the Bay (1996-97) set in the Allihies in Country Cork. With Idir Cruaiche is na Carraige (1997) what is revealed is concealed, a multi-layered process, and so we become aware of the way nature procreates its forms, some containers, others open and eroded. The language involves the physics of materials, the way environments, weather, and human culture all intertwine, as the ebb and flow of life’s rhythms go on and on.
For Sculpture in the Parklands 2009 commission, Alan Counihan’s Passage is a poetic piece if landscape intervention, and all about the passage of time, our memory of place, and the site sensitive moment in time. Time’s arrows leave us with a physical place and the passage is through the peat land. As a passage it is time bound yet exists as a way through matter, and we move through the contrasts of steel and black peat as if this were a tunnel of time, only to find the landscape expanding at the other end where we witness three vertical elements. The resonance of seeing these three elements reifies our sense of this living ever changing natural reality we are a part of. Passage links us to it all, and in a strange way are reminiscent of German artist Martin Kippenberger’s METRO-Net subway entrances set in Dawson City Yukon in 1995, and connecting to an island in Greece where a similar subway entrance was built, to thus form conceptual links to varying landscape sites. The difference is that Counihan’s art in situ is a time passage, minimal in its editing down of materials to the essential. Like a trench, that passes into a landscape of light, Passage references the material landscape, and its material ecology, something that has shaped our economies, our ways of living in relation to nature, and even the way we communicate in a very specific way, whatever bio-region of the world we live in. The narrow gauge rail tracks on the floor/ground of this “earth bridge” and the sleepers, recycle the industrial remnants and traces that link Bord na Mona to the land. The three rails point to the sky and a trail and path lead backwards into a backdrop of nature.
John Grande Art/Nature Dialogues
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