At the heart of Eilis O’Connell’s work is poetry in the simplest sense. Like a poet reconstructs common every day words into concentrated, magical and moving art, O'Connell takes material and shape and reconfigures it into new meaningful and beautifully articulated sculpture. Many of Eilis O'Connell's sculptures recall D. G. Rossetti ‘moment’s monument’ sonnets or odes to a material or shape, forms bursting, folding, curving, turning, weaving, cutting, merging, flowing and balancing. They achieve a simultaneous feeling of both great antiquity and novel modernity, primal and advanced.

O’Connell’s thinking is a haptic journey of discovery, of herself, a material, a process and an image. As a maker the object is handled, turned, questioned, thought and felt, it is the feeling in both senses of the word that makes the object into sculpture. Never a minimalist but certainly a reductionist O’Connell concentrates an object into its intense, essential form, through making.