Belfast
The MAC (Metropolitan Arts Centre)
Graham Gingles, Ireland’s most accomplished sculptor, has been building boxes since the beginning of the ’70s, many of them somber meditations on the Troubles realized in an elliptical, covert, and highly personal manner. These works make no reference to the graphic imagery reproduced in the media on a daily basis, and so, too, with At times like these men were wishing they were all kinds of insects, a commission to commemorate World War I in which Gingles felt that he couldn’t compete with the overt horrors of the war itself. Paradoxically, this most private of artists took up the challenge of the public arena for this project, which was, in effect, a war memorial, and the scale of the enterprise meant that, like the hero in Gulliver’s Travels, he had to shift from a Lilliputian box to a Brobdingnagian one.…see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
