Over the past twenty years Alan Counihan has realised many large site-specific works in the public domain and exhibited widely both in Ireland and the U.S.A. His work is in many public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. While perhaps best known for his object-based work his practice also incorporates photography, theatre, texts and curation. Recent projects include The Weavers’ Gifts, a celebration of the Costanoan-Ohlone tribes of Central California, USA, and Olmo/Elm/Leamhán, an exploration of the disappearance of the European elm tree. In 2008 he took part in the NewSites-New Fields landscape research project with the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Ireland, and in September 2009 will be Artist-in Residence at Sculpture in the Parklands, Boora Bog, Co Offaly, Ireland..
STATEMENT:
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.