THE MAIN QUADRANGLE QUEENS UNIVERSITY 24 JUNE 2014
When I photographed this in June 2014 I was unable to locate any information relating to this sculpture but a few years I came across the following information:
This Reclining Figure by Frederick Edward McWilliam (1909-92) was relocated from the quadrangle at the David Keir building to the main Quadrangle at the Lanyon Building Queen’s University in 2013 and it took me five years to find any information relating to this interesting bronze sculpture.
Frederick Edward McWilliam CBE RA (30 April 1909 – 13 May 1992), was a Northern Irish surrealist sculptor, born in Banbridge, County Down. He worked chiefly in stone, wood and bronze.
Commissions included the Four Seasons Group for the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951. McWilliam exhibited at Waddington Galleries, London, and had a major retrospective show at the Tate Gallery in 1989.
In 1964 he was awarded an Honorary D.Litt. from the Queen’s University Belfast. In 1966 he was awarded a C.B.E. and in 1971 he won the Oireachtas Gold Medal. McWilliam is represented in many public collections, including MOMA (New York) and Tate Britain.
The Queens University estate comprises more than 250 buildings, 98 of which are listed. The Lanyon Building, which opened in 1849 and is named after its architect Sir Charles Lanyon, is the centrepiece of the estate.
LOUISE WALSH FROM CORK IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS SCULPTURE IN BELFAST
The Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker is a 1992 sculpture by Louise Walsh in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
I first photographed this sculpture in June 2014 and again in May 2018 and I must admit that I like it.
The sculpture is located on the city’s Great Victoria Street adjacent to the Europa Hotel. It is cast in bronze and features two working-class women with symbols of women’s work embedded on the surfaces. Domestic items such as colanders, a shopping basket and clothes pegs are part of the sculpture.
The Department of the Environment’s original commission, in the late 1980s, was for an artwork to reflect the nearby Amelia Street’s history as a red-light district. Walsh’s design “Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker” was accepted by the project’s landscape architect and the Art in Public Spaces Research Group, however the Belfast Development Office and the Belfast City Council opposed the project and the selected design, and the project was dropped in 1989. A few years later a private developer recommissioned the work and it was erected in 1992 (30 years ago).
Walsh was born in County Cork, and received her MA in sculpture from the University of Ulster.
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