Rowan Gillespie has been one of Ireland's most successful artists for many years. His unique bronze cast sculptures appear in private collections, in public places and global corporations. He has brilliantly depicted some great Irish writers and poets, like James Joyce, WB Yeats and Gerald Manley Hopkins, to significant universal appeal.
He is a one-man band. He firmly believes that the entire process of sculptural expression is a single organic process and is best handled by one man alone: from hastily formed concept; to modeling in clay, casting in bronze; welding through to installation. His refined bronze casting techniques, based on the ancient lost-wax process, have enabled him to portray form with extreme. heightened drama.
Filmed over an eighteen month period in six different countries, Sculpting Life is the first film exploration of Rowan Gillespie's intriguing career. This documentary from Moondance Productions charts the birth of an important new international sculpture commission, brought to life by the hands of this internationally renowned Irish artist. Perhaps his best known work is at Dublin Quay, Famine, stark, stricken, emaciated figures representing the plight of forced migrants throughout history. In 2007 he completed a series of new figures to depict these exiles as they might have arrived in Canada 160 years ago.
We follow Rowan as he explores their proposed location in Toronto's Ireland Park at Bathurst Quay. where thousands of refugees, escaping the famine in Ireland, ultimately landed, only to perish in the fever sheds.
Given unique access by the artist, the film makers have watched the creation of one of these figures from beginning to completion. This figure itself was inspired by Pius Mulvey, one of the central characters featured in international author Joseph O'Connor's best selling novel, Star of the Sea, set in the famine years. The greatest praise for this sculpture is provided by Joseph O'Connor himself, when he is shown it by the artist for the first time.
Traveling to Norway, the documentary follows Gillespie to the source of his greatest inspiration, the Munch Museum, where the work of Edvard Munch is hung In Holland, Belgium, Liechtenstein and Colorado, some of Gillespie's other beautiful sculptures are on display and are tended as lovingly by him as a father would his children.