Catherine Marshall on John Byrne
Catherine Marshall, Irish Times - Saturday, November 22, 2008
"John Byrne is the contemporary visual equivalent to the poet in ancient Irish society who used sharp wit to expose hypocrisy, mediocrity and pretentiousness. In his art practice Byrne examines issues from a comic perspective, reducing monuments of political, religious and cultural division to the ridiculous. His approach varies from performance to film to tableau re-enactment and he has used all of these very effectively to undermine prejudice and stereotype. "
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A Shout in the Street
Declan McGonigal - Tuesday, January 01, 2008
"John Byrne's practice could also be described as a strategy... (his) approach reminds me of an expression which is used in rural Ireland. 'Whistling past the graveyard'. It refers to the fear passing a rural graveyard at night. In order to bypass that fear you would whistle a cheerful tune as you passed. "
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Dublin's Last Supper
Jane Powers, Irish Times magazine - Saturday, July 03, 2004
"....The process started many months earlier with John wandering the streets of Dublin looking for suitable candidates to fill the seats at his table.... ....all the 'apostles', are exemplary, and hard working- eager to give this hyper, talkative and quirkily creative artist their very best. Their collective goodwill fills the room with a pleasant, excited glow. Thirteen very different souls have come together to be captured in a remarkable art work...."
Would you die for Ireland?
Marianne Hartigan, Sunday Tribune - Sunday, October 19, 2003
"....Most impressive was John Byrne's video where he simply stopped people in the street.... and asked them would they die for Ireland?.... it seemed somehow very moving that so many (men and women) would answer yes.... Byrne is one of surprisingly few Irish artists who consistently deals with issues focusing on Ireland, it's history, and Irishness"
Luke Clancy, CIRCA Art magazine - Saturday, November 01, 2003
"Would you die for Ireland is the title of Byrne's little hand-held sparkler of a work.... (he) takes a typically adroit approach to the question, offering not to interpret the historical issues literally, but instead to lift one salient point of the Emmet story bodily into the contemporary era"
The Border Interpretative Centre
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times - Wednesday, January 24, 2001
"The new show at Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery entitled The Border Itself, documents a remarkable cultural experiment. When the Irish Border had it's own interpretative centre. "
Read More....Sean O'Hagan, The Observer Review - Sunday, March 18, 2001
"....This piece of art provocation.... (Byrne) has chosen the Irish border, literally and metaphorically, as the focus for all his anxieties and obsessions about his divided self, as the starting point for an often surreal investigation of his Northern Irishness.... Byrne's work is slightly mad but strangely instructive...."
Niamh Anne Kelly, Art Monthly - Thursday, March 01, 2001
"As in common with the best of satire, this project carries with it connotations of uncomfortable truths that are generally left under examined"
Press on other work
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times - Wednesday, September 16, 1998
"Among Your Own" (Arthouse gallery, Dublin 1998) entails an altogether less respectful attitude... The images... use artifice to get beneath the skin, and after reading through Byrne's bitingly sarcastic commentary on growing up in Northern Ireland, and learning how things work there in terms of such realities as religious bigotry and the border, you do feel you've had a glimpse of what it is, or was, really like...."
Emer O'Kelly, The Sunday Independent - Sunday, October 19, 1997
"The third one-man show I saw, John Byrne's 'A Border Worrier' (The Project, Dublin 1997) is in a class of it's own. The performance art element is powerful, as Byrne engages with a barrow load of grass tufted earth, moulding it and willing it into a character that will ease his obsession with 'the border'.... But this is no nationalist polemic, more a superbly externalised piece of comic neurosis, a thinking man's coming to terms with a heritage that mixes violence and distress in almost equal parts. It's also strangely moving and wonderfully funny."
Live art magazine, UK - Wednesday, January 01, 1997
"....John Byrne presented 'Space / A Man With Guts. 'Within the abstract lines drawn on his blackboard was exposed the shape of the province. His lazerbeam monologues spun round the nature of Space, Performance, The Troubles and Loss of Faith. With the realisation that the province he'd now created was sore, he lovingly rubbed cream within it's borders to make it better. The simplicity tore the heart."
Luke Clancy on John Byrne
Reflecting on John Byrne's Exhibition at the Fenton Gallery in Cork - Wednesday, June 01, 2005
"It is probably only those on the outside of a difficult situation who approach it with circumspection. Those inside cultural or political problems can perhaps afford to regard them with less earnest correctness. These days it seems we are all to ready to jump through hoops in our anxious determination to ensure that each situation of cultural difference or difficulty that we encounter is treated with the appropriate gravitas and that no cause is ever given for offence.
"
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Equestrian Project
Ballynun Gets new local hero Irish Times Roisin Ingle - Friday, September 10, 2010
"IF THERE was an award for the most democratic piece of public art in Ireland, a magnificent new sculpture due to be unveiled next week in Ballymun, Dublin would gallop away with it.
The sculpture, by artist John Byrne, references classical equestrian art but toys with tradition by placing the figure of a teenage girl from Ballymun – resplendent in bronze tracksuit and velcro-fastened runners – as the bareback rider on the horse.
Misneach , “courage” in Irish, is a stunning piece of work to rival that other classic Ballymun equine pop culture moment from The Commitments , where a horse is seen being led into a lift because “the stairs would kill him”.
Byrne was commissioned by Breaking Ground, the Per Cent for Art scheme that accompanied Ballymun’s redevelopment, to create a piece of public art for the area’s town centre. In a YouTube video of the making of Misneach Belfast-born Byrne explains he was interested in subverting the military sculptures found in squares and towns across Europe, which invariably feature military men astride horses.
“These things are commonplace in European towns and cities – nearly always men military men the great and the good as it were, but of course one person’s hero is another’s tyrant,” Byrne says.
He also wanted to celebrate the tradition of young people riding horses bareback around Dublin.
The artist, who made Dublin’s Last Supper mural for the city’s Italian Quarter, was aware of John Henry Foley’s bronze horse used in the Gough Memorial in the Phoenix Park, near where he lives in Cabra. The work by Queen Victoria’s favourite sculptor was blown up in 1957 and sold by the Office of Public Works to a member of the Guinness family who gifted it to an ancestor of Gough’s, Sir Humphrey Wakefield. Byrne discovered that Wakefield restored the monument and resurrected it in the grounds of his home at Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. “I thought he would tell me to take a jump but he was delighted when I asked if I could copy his horse,” says Byrne.
From the beginning, a young local woman was always going to feature on the horse to assert the idea that people from all walks of life can be as heroic as the most celebrated, mostly male, mostly older public figures.
Back in 2007 open auditions were held in Ballymun to find a teenager between 13 and 18 who had a genuine love of horses. Eventually, 20 teenagers were photographed on horseback and the then 17-year-old Toni Marie Shields was chosen. She was scanned using state-of-the-art 3D software to make a mould for the work. Her mould and the mould from the model of the Gough horse were then combined to make the bronze sculpture.
A soft green patina applied at the end of the process gives the work an antiquated feel and the effect is of a sculpture straight out of the 18th century. “Ah, it’s lovely but it’s huge,” was Toni-Marie’s response when she first saw herself in bronze, one-and-half times life size.
The work, which is awaiting its inevitable nickname, will be placed on a hand-carved stone plinth just inside the gates of Trinity Comprehensive School in Ballymun and resited on Main Street when the Metro rail project is completed. "
