Michael Quane RHA’s work is wrought to existence from his practice of drawing on paper and carving of stone. Fundamental to his sculpture is an awareness of gravity as a persistent presence around him in the physical world and within, which is topical in his work. As Quane explains “this awareness is referred to in the series of works gravity swimmers which perhaps, as an expression, is notional that gravity is an atheistic God surrogate, being metaphysically the medium through which we swim and is his expression of a scientific understanding that geologically and astronomically gravity imposes order on what would otherwise be a chaotic Universe. It is the invisibility that shapes the planets and fuses stars, maintains orbits, and governs galaxies.

Having some metaphysical equivalence to and conversion with gravity is medium; the very stuff that life is supported and surrounded by; air, water, amniotic fluid. It is this preoccupation that brought to life the series of works called Buoyed and A-Shebuoyed (a-shebuoyed is derived from amoeboid). The sobriety and weightiness of gravity is sometimes countered lightly by buoyed’s inflatability.”

He works with what appears to be an intractable material, stone, however he returns time and again to the elemental practice of drawing with the chisel on its surface. The stone and chisel together provides Quane with an immediacy similar to pencil and charcoal on paper but with the added facility, through repeated scrapings with the chisel, of drawing the rough hewn surface of the rock into deliberate form.

Michael Quane, born in 1962, lives and works in County Cork. He has exhibited throughout Ireland, UK, Western Europe, and the US. His work is present in private and public collections throughout. He is a member of Aosdána and was elected a full Member of the RHA in 2004.