Iconic Irish sculptor Louise Walsh will share stories from her life and career, including her famous Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker on Great Victoria Street which sparked contoversy in Belfast City Council in 1989. The conversation with leading local journalist, Amanda Ferguson, will be followed by a group photo at the monument which attendees are welcome to join.
Born in Co Cork in 1963, Louise Walsh received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Ulster in 1986. She lectured at the Limerick School of Art and Design (1988-1996) and the National College of Art and Design (1992-2022).
Amanda Ferguson from north Belfast has been a freelance journalist since 2010. She works as a Northern Ireland Editor and Ireland Stringer for a wide range of clients, including Reuters news agency and The Washington Post, as well as an event host, and broadcaster with various radio, TV and digital media outlets.She is also an NUJ member, and co-founder of Women in Media Belfast. You can find her online via Amanda.ie
Louise Walsh’s site-specific sculptural interventions interrogate ‘othered’ dynamics of embodied experience and desire. Her countercultural themes seek to puncture and transform constricted orthodoxies in queer, intersectional feminist and national identities. She playfully contests established forms and embedded lore to explore persisting joy, survival and rebellion.
Her installation projects include:
To Fruit (and Multiply), a site-specific sculpture commissioned for the Ballina Arts Centre, Mayo as part of I am what I am, celebrating queer artists who work with gender, sexuality, identity and queer politics (2021).
Hydra/In Law for Elliptical Affinities: Irish women and the Politics of the Body, 1984 to the present. Highlanes Gallery and Limerick City Gallery (2019-2020).
Outlaws Inlaws. As part of In a State an exhibition in Kilmanham Gaol on National Identity (1991).
Sounding the Depths, a collaborative video and photographic installation with Pauline Cummins, for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin(1992), exhibited in the Tate Gallery Liverpool, Kunstlerhaus, Graz, Austria and Street Level Photographic Gallery, Glasgow, all in 1993. Exhibited as part of The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now, Protest and Conflict in IMMA Dublin 8 (2021-2011)
Walsh’s many commissioned artworks are located in public spaces, she negotiates these contexts through the participation of various constituencies or communities using dialogue, collaborative as well as educational practices. Her public art projects include; The Hybrid Loveseat, at Jame’s Hospital Luas stop, Dublin 8 (2004-2008). Circuit, at the entrance of the Royal Victoria Hospital (2000). An installation on a public walkway at Pier 4A, in T1, Heathrow Airport (1994). and Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker Belfast.
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