Alan Counihan

Title: The Mound of the Torches

Year of Installation: 1996
Dimensions: Height, 3 Metres
Medium: Limestone
Location: Halfway, Bandon, Co Cork
Details of Commission: Commissioned by Cork County Council with funding from the Per Cent for Art Scheme to mark the improvements to the N71 between Ballinhassig and Innishannon.

Title: Blackwater Moon

Year of Installation: 1997
Dimensions: Height, 3 Metres
Medium: Limestone
Location: Waterford Road, Youghal, Co Cork
Details of Commission: Commissioned by Cork County Council with funding from the Per Cent for Art Scheme arising from the construction of the N25 Youghal relief road.  The work is an imaginative response to the brief, which called for a sculpture reflecting the history and geographical location of Youghal.  The piece suggests the phases of the moon and the movement of the tides. 

Artist Bio: Alan Counihan was born in Dublin in 1954.  Over the past twenty years he has realised many large site-specific works in the public domain and exhibited widely both in Ireland and the U.S.A.  His work is in many public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.  He has received several grants and awards including the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award.  While perhaps best known for his object-based work his practice also incorporates photography, theatre, texts and installation.

Counihan's practice engages with the human relationship to landscape, and how it is inhabited, remembered and imagined.  His work seeks to explore the need to imbue landscape with meaning and inherited notions of cultural identity, the enshrinement of memory in place and its inevitable erosion and revision.

Counihan writes of his two public sculptures in Cork: 'The sites were particularly challenging in terms of scale, and the whole notion of creating sculpture which will be experienced almost exclusively from a moving vehicle is unusual, to say the least.  Fortunately I was able to shape the roundabout at Halfway to suit the sculpture, so that even that strange environment has a certain sense of place about it.  I wanted the work to have some of the mysterious echoes of our past and to have some suggestion of a place of ancient ritual, while at the same time appearing extremely bold and contemporary, simple and strong.  There is no attempt here to recreate a mythical landscape, but rather to retranslate visually our ancient megalithic tradition in a contemporary and abstract way'.

Artist Website:  www.alancounihan.net