Completed Boora sculptures unveiled

The official launch of completed sculptures by artists Julian Wild (UK) and Alan Counihan (Ireland) at Lough Boora Parklands took place last Friday. Over the last two years Julian Wild as gleaned pieces of metal scrap from the Bord na Mona workshops in Lough Boora. He sees the process as a kind of archaeology in which each old cog and piece of metal tells part of the story of the sites' rich industrial heritage. Welding these scrap pieces of peat wagons and cutting machinery together, the artist constructed an 18 metre long sculpture in a canal at the site. The concept is to create a disk that appears to bounce over the surface of the canal, like a skimming stone. Alan Counihan's practice engages with the human relationship to landscape, with how it is inhabited, remembered and imagined. His work seeks to explore the need to imbue landscape with meaning and inherited notions of cultural identity, the enshrinement of memory in place and its inevitable erosion and revision. Alan's work at Sculpture in the Parklands explored man's relationship with his landscape.