Geoff Ireland

​ Selected Review Statements:

•   Daniel Thomas, Art Critic SMH "A young sculptors first Show; abstract constructions of carved wood or of carved limestone. He looks wonderfully serious, wonderfully sure of what sculpture is........I find these quiet pieces very persistent in recollection."

 

•  Daniel Thomas ....'New Faces of 1974': Geoffrey Ireland a fine.. sculptor.

 

• Jeffrey Ormiston ...'Review' ..."To let the Geoffrey Ireland's exhibition at the Sculpture Centre pass without comment would be unfair, for it was the early maturity of a real creative talent.....Creative talent , sensibility and technical skill are the elements of all arts of real stature, Geoffrey Ireland posses these talents."

 

•  Nancy Borlace, Telegraph ...Art Critic: "Geoff Ireland moves into centre stage as a sculptor of originality..working with large blocks of white Limestone held between steel vices or cantilevered in space....these sculptures have an expressive power and a brutalism that generates a similar psychological reaction of that of ...Richard Serra."

 

• John Mc Donald Art,  Critic SMH ....."An ideal harmony is always present in these perfect circles and right angles that peep out from behind the wreckage, but this does little to tone down the underlying aggressiveness of Ireland's forms.....the longer one looks the more engrossing this debate becomes as each work takes a more distinctive identity.....Ireland's work is on a small domestic scale ...yet these pieces are object lessons in how big a psychological charge can be packed into a relatively small space, and how much subliminal force can be hidden in a supposedly abstract sculpture.."

 

•  (Dr) Jacques Delaruelle, Sydney Review ,'Poetry of Matter'....Though the overall impression from his work is one of elaborate voluptuousness, the artist vies to go beyond the  pleasure principle. The relationship between the external form and the intimate core of each sculpture imparts harmony to the composition and this balance is, I believe, the main ambition of Geoff Ireland's sculptures. Undoubtedly, the artist has taken pleasure in fashioning his objects, but in so doing, does not seek to please himself alone. In the play of forms and materials he has isolated an affective quality that implies a grammar of sense, or the order of feeling that has structured his compositions.

 

• Ken Scarlett, 'Contemporary Sculpture in Australian Gardens' (Macquarie University)....To place any sculpture within this geometrically self-sufficient combination of architecture and landscape would be extremely difficult, if not visually destructive. Geoffrey Ireland's tough and compact sculpture

     AUS ICON sits on the edge of this quadrangle, almost on the pathway, not daring to intrude,

        US

but aggressively , survives nevertheless. Fragments of the American and Australian flags - stars ,   stripes, crosses and the rectangular format -  are used as motifs stated in heavy steel ; nothing idly flutters in the breeze in this small but assertive work....

                                                                                                                          

• (Dr)Christopher Allen...'Sailing to Byzantium'......The question that Geoffrey Ireland asks of a sculpture as it evolves in his hands is a deceptively simple one: how can it become a 'thing'?........Above all, Ireland's Byzantium is a place in which aesthetic resolution is still a possibility, where the scattered and apparently heterogeneous fragments of our world can still be brought together - as aesthetic "things' - in a spirit of transcendent play.

 

• Lesley Harding...Curator 'The Visibility of Practice'.....The endowment with solid form of a moment of time materialises in Geoff Ireland's sculptures. However the real interest of the work lies in its artist's intuitive approach to making and meaning. As a sculptor committed to the physical act of casting in bronze and construction, fascinated through not subdued by the convention of his craft, he thinks through the difficulties of making art and plays with them.....the sculptures are time bound, made in reference to the History of Sculpture, but also testimony to the fact that the artist has given over to an unknown that resides precisely in the energy of labour.