Eileen MacDonagh

Eileen MacDonagh was born in Sligo and has worked as a sculptor since the early 1980s. Her work has featured in many exhibitions, both in Ireland and abroad, including shows in Portugal, Scotland, India and Japan. Eileen has both organised and participated in many symposia, in Ireland and abroad; her work is included in numerous collections, such as the OPW, Kilkenny and Cork County Councils, Marlay Park, Dublin and Tawara Newtown, Osaka, Japan.

McDonagh works mainly in stone to produce fascinating large scale sculptures. Due to the size of her work, she has tended to concentrate on on public commissions rather than exhibiting in the context of the gallery.

Her fist solo exhibition, Truss in 1992, showed works made from both wood and stone and garnered great reviews for the artist. This enabled McDonagh to make a name for herself as a sculptor capable of taking on large scale projects, and she has built up an astounding body of public art. Her pieces can be seen in Waterford, Tullamore, and Cork, as well as in Germany, Luxembourg and Japan.

The sculptures in a recent exhibition examines McDonagh’s fascination with geometry. As an artist she has long been inspired by the purity and ubiquity of geometric principles and the way in which geometric rules govern the universe. The show will feature four major installations, the largest of which will be comprised of fifteen pieces of differing size. The individual pieces are based on the icosahedron, a complex geometric shape, and are carved from over ten different types of Indian granite. They range in size from 4 foot in diametre to just 4 inches, and were all created when McDonagh was on a residency in India.