By Sean O’Driscoll, UK Times
Image Caption: Paul Gregg’s artwork is inspired by Gaelic handball, which he describes as “a distilled, elemental form of sport” AOIFE MURPHY
The hurling is over and the football will be soon, but the GAA has a new attraction to draw the crowds: conceptual art. The organisation has sponsored an installation inspired by Gaelic Handball at the Royal Hibernian Academy gallery in Dublin created by Paul Gregg, an American artist living in the capital.
The piece is part of "Inductive Probability", an exhibition of Gregg’s work. It features a representation of a handball court with wooden panels, some of which are tilted at an angle to make it harder to play — a metaphor for the randomness of both sport and life.
Gregg said that he was inspired by stories of great Irish athletes such as Eddie Keher, the legendary Kilkenny hurler known for his accuracy and disciplined training. He chose handball because it “represents a distilled, elemental form of sport: the skill of the human body, a wall and a small ball,” according to the description beside the work.
Gregg deliberately tilted the wooden panels to more difficult angles to represent “the notion of change and irrationality”.
While other pieces in the retrospective exhibition are recreations of Gregg’s previous art already on display in public spaces throughout the world, the handball court is “a substantial new object”.
The work was launched on Thursday night by Darragh Daly, a National Development Officer for GAA Handball, with Dublin Handballer Rob Farrelly also in attendance to provide an exhibition match, and encourage art fans to give the wall a go.
“When I first heard about this idea last April, I was intrigued. I talked to Paul about the shape of the walls and the dimensions of a handball court, but it was all his concept. I had never done anything like this before and it was very enjoyable to come down and give it a go. I thought it was very novel to have the different angles and quite tricky to play on” Daly said.
GAA Handball also supplied more than two hundred handballs for the exhibit (which is open to the public with free admission for the next 5 weeks) and led the first test of the court.
The exhibit includes a series of random dots on the other side of the wall, meant to look like a school maths puzzle. Together they are entitled "Mens sana in corpore sano", or “a healthy mind in healthy body”.
Mr Gregg told The Times that the work “combines both sides of an education — the sport on one side and learning on the other.”
Other works in the exhibition include an aquarium in which fish swim in and out of a model of Dublin’s Liberty Hall, a giant helium balloon and a revolving brass loudspeaker, through which a tenor sang on the opening day.