Sculpture often goes for the heroic, the ideal, the more-than-human, but there’s a place in my heart for sculpted images of real, even ordinary, people doing human things and sometimes sharing space with actual live people.
The installation above, installed on a busy shopping street in Dublin in 1988, is by Jackie McKenna. Its official name is ‘The Meeting Place,’ but some local wags have dubbed it ‘The Hags with the Bags.’
The piece above, in the National Gallery of Ireland, is not only human in expression and form, but represents an actual person, Garry Hynes, a prominent Irish theater director and the first woman to win a Tony award as a director. It was commissioned by the gallery as part of the Hennessy Portrait Prize won in 2015 by sculptor Vera Klute.
Best of all is if a sculpture makes you do a double take — to decide if it’s real or not!