THE FLYING ANGEL BY MAURICE HARRON IS DEDICATED TO SEAFARERS
A bronze and stainless steel angel reaches out from the bow of a ship built at the side of the Mission to Seafarers building. The figure is the symbol of the Seafarers’ Mission, a religious charity set up in the 18th Century to provide sailors with shelter and comfort. Find it at Prince’s Dock Street, off Pilot Street and just north of Clarendon Dock.
Harron was born and grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland. He studied sculpture at the Ulster College of Art and Design in Belfast.
Much of his work is public art sculpture and he has works sited in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland. Two of his most acclaimed commissions are Reconcilition/Hands Across the Divide in Carlisle Square, Derry, overlooking the Craigavon Bridge crossing the River Foyle, and the Gaelic Chieftain, arguably his most experimental and impressive piece sited in the Curlew Mountains, County Roscommon. This statue overlooks the site of the Battle of Curlew Pass, fought in August 1599, when a Gaelic Irish force under Hugh Roe O’Donnell defeated an English column during the Nine Years War.
His work Let the Dance Begin, dating from 2000, is sited near the Lifford Bridge in Strabane, County Tyrone and was commissioned by the Strabane Lifford Development Commission. It features 5 semi-abstract figures (a fiddler, a flautist, a drummer and two dancers) on the theme of music and dance, each 4 metres high and is made of stainless steel, bronze and ceramic tile mosaic. It is one of the largest pieces of public art in Ireland.
The Workers is a monument made from stainless steel and stone and is located at The Dry Arch Roundabout in Letterkenny. The monument was created in 2001 and commemorates a generation of men who worked on building the original bridge and train track at the Dry Arch. He also created the The Rabble Children monument in Letterkenny.
He also has work sited in the United Kingdom and the United States, where he created the Irish Famine Memorial on Cambridge Common, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was dedicated on 23 July 1997.
THE SMITHFIELD UTAH BY ALAN BUTLER – FANCY A CUP OF TEA?
This is located in Smithfield, Dublin rather than Smithfield [Utah]. It is close to the LUAS Tram Stop.
I used an iPhone 12 Pro Max and the Halide App to photograph this metal sculpture.
The Smithfield Square Lower commission invited artists to propose an artwork that promotes meaningful interaction between people and place through contemporary sculptural practice. It asked artists to consider how public sculpture can define a space and re-focus people’s attention, enabling a deeper and enduring relationship between residents, workers, tourists, commuters and a city-centre neighbourhood.
The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid with a nearly rotationally symmetrical body. Using a teapot model is considered the 3D equivalent of a “Hello, World!” program, a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as the basic geometry for a scene with a light setup. Some programming libraries, such as the OpenGL Utility Toolkit,even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots.
The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah. It was one of the first to be modelled using bézier curves rather than precisely measured.
Alan Butler is an artist living and working in Dublin. Educated at NCAD, Dublin and LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore, he works across a range of media to primarily explore digital cultures and video games. His work has been exhibited widely in museums, galleries and arts festivals around the world, and is part of many collections, including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Ireland, and the Arts Council of Ireland. He is part of the multi-disciplinary collective Annex, which will represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021.
Note: Smithfield is a city in Cache County, Utah, United States. The population was 9,495 at the 2010 United States Census, with an estimated population of 12,025 in 2019. It is included in the Logan, Utah-Idaho Metropolitan Statistical Area, and is the second largest city in the area after Logan, the county seat.
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