thanks, slivers of rescued stainless steel cut with a plasma cutter then folded over and over again, same with the hair.

Hi I guess I didn't log on earlier but I love the wrinkles if you do anything like this again do you think you can make a youtube video and show me I need to learn whatever you are doing. I love it. great flow it looks like silver fabric.

Hi Eamonn,
What an amazing feat....is she life size???
She is haunting... quite a depth of feeling involved...SteelyJan

Hi Guys,
Thanks again for the lovely comments. The rescued/recycled steel is indeed kitchen sinks and cookers, the interior (skeleton and muscles if you like) is made from mild steel, to give it strength and a certain solidity.
As for the techniques, my mig welder is treated like a paintbrush, and by using thin slivers of steel and various grinders it would be easier to describe the way I work the steel as moulding, kinda like wax or clay, just using grinders and heat and whacking sticks to shape it.
For those interested in what she's about heres the statement for the signage beside the installed sculpture.

To grow up in Kells in the Fifties and Sixties was inevitably to be aware of the local industrial heritage. The landscape from the Ross to Ron’s factory and beyond was dotted with ‘works’ present and past. Central to developments had been the Glenwhirry River which, in the civil parish of Conor, became Kells Water.

As a sense of that industrial history increasingly slips away, the Glenravel sculptor Eamonn Higgins imagines a lean bodied rough-handed millworker of the middle 20th century. She is clothed in an apron whose rising texture represents the progress from raw lint to refined linen. From her hair severely restrained by a band to her firmly-planted strapped shoes she knows a hard daily reality. Yet there is a faraway look in her worn but intelligent face. She stands at an angle to the present, the artists submits, because she is looking back to former days and perhaps to a lost love. Her individual retrospect he then sees as a metaphor of a past receding from the communal history.

Created for Kells and Connor Improvement Committee this sculpture was funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, through the Re-Imaging Art Programme, 2008-9. Eamonn Higgins is an Honours graduate of the University of Lincoln who has been involved in regeneration projects in both England and Northern Ireland.

oh aye, she is indeed life size.

thanks, there is indeed some great spirits about the land my favourite is bushmills Irish whiskey, but Jamisons gets all the glory : )
If you're ever over these parts again let me know I'll tell you where all my work is hiding.

thanks again

Eamonn Higgins

Your welcome! I do plan to go back...the question is when? I've been to Bushmills and took the tour...got to see how Irish Whiskey is made. Is it true that Guinness is no longer made in Ireland? I heard that it is now made in Canada and shipped out. I would love to see you work in person! I'll be sure to keep you informed!

Cheers!

Jamie Santellano

Look forward to it.
The guiness you drink probably is brewed in Canada. But the dublin brewery still brews the porter for most of the world.

Eamonn

Stephen Fitz-Gerald
Dear Eamonn.
Good job there!
You've managed to capture the wistfulness in her visage despite minor anatomical distortions.That is hard to do.
I think you've used the medium well and presented a powerful piece. The dress is indeed so well done it threatens to distract the eye from the face but as soon as you catch that gaze it nails you...