'Breadth Becomes Air' is part of a recent collection of work by contemporary Irish sculptor Eilis O'Connell. This immensely tactile marble sculpture is shaped by folds, curves and edges which oscillate between biomorphic and geometric forms. For O’Connell, this was an experimental work – “I wanted to see how much air I could get into a big block of stone without compromising its structural strength”, she shares. “I think of air as a material to work with, and that is a huge challenge when working in stone”.

Eilis O’Connell’s making process is a deeply inquisitive one with a strong personal sense of the Poetic. 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’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.

Material is always important to O’Connell and she has found personal and new meaning for bronze, stone, wood, wire mesh, corten steel and much more. Meaning is teased out of these durable materials with her sense of simplification. 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 Eilis concentrates an object into its intense, essential form, through making.

Eilis O’Connell studied at Crawford School of Art, Cork and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She is a Royal Hibernian Academician, has won awards from the British School at Rome and the Royal Society of Arts and undertaken residencies in both France and Spain. She has completed numerous large scale public commissions and has shown at the Venice, Paris and Sao Paolo Biennales. Her small sculptures were shown at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice and in 2018 her outdoor sculptures were exhibited at E1027 the home designed by Eileen Grey in Cap Martin, France. She recently had her first solo exhibition 'Breadth becomes Air' at Pangolin London.

Pangolin London are proud to present Eilis O'Connell.