Peace sculptures added to Cavan streetscape

Five new sculptures are being added to Cavan's townscape and will be launched this Thursday. Peace III funded, the five works have the common theme of 'peace', each produced by a local artist with input from a community group. They will be sited at various locations along Farnham Street and Cathedral Road including at the Johnston Central Library, Cavan Courthouse and Con Smith Park. Cavan residents and visitors will already be familiar with the work of sculptors Joey Burns, Joe Doherty, Edwin Lynch, Tina Quinn and Padraig Cahill from pieces they produced last year for the Fleadh. Siobhan Wallace, network coordinator for the Peace III team in Cavan County Council, agreed: "These pieces are going to be about the town or the county for years and years to come," she said. "Those involved in carving doves, for example, will bring their grandchildren and show them how they contributed to the landscape of Cavan." Alongside these five pieces at the launch, there will also be sculptures produced by prisoners from Loughan House with artist Jackie McKenna. Five artists Joe Doherty worked with a group of retired army men from Cootehill. During a series of workshops, they decided they wanted something functional and a bridge seemed appropriate. "They were always on the front line of things - on the Border and when they did the missions abroad like in Cyprus and Lebanon," says Joe, "and they had to assemble bridges as an initial part of their peace keeping." The resulting sculpture, over eight foot long and three foot high, will rest in Con Smith Park. Details such as the infantry pike and the men's footprints will make it personal work for the ex-servicemen. "My hand isn't really seen. I'm like the engineer or coordinator," says Joey Burns of the piece he and a group of young people from Cavan Youthreach made. "The dove kept turning up. The twin towers disaster was mentioned, and I had a piece of twin bog oak at home waiting for over 20 years to do something special with it." When Padraig Cahill sat in on his first meeting with the Multicultural network: "We talked about peace and it just flowed. "One of the main things that came up was that peace is about togetherness and that the absence of peace is when people are apart or indifferent to each other," says the sculptor. Hence the finished piece comprises two parts to it and the image of the dove is formed from the negative space between the two sculptures. Edwin Lynch worked with 050, a group for men and women in County Cavan aged over 50. "I didn't want to use the usual things that represent peace," says Edwin. "I gave the group a couple of words, such as peace and anger, and they had to come up with line shapes of what those words represented to them. For peace they came up with this nice curved shape - like water ripples." His steel piece, which by now sits in front of the Johnston Central Library, comprises three steel waves representing the gentleness of peace. Tina Quinn created hersculpture with the participants of the Messines Programme. The group wanted a piece of public art that encapsulated not the glory of the Cavan men who fought during the First World War but a piece that captured humanity, mutual respect, brotherhood, tolerance and an acceptance of the past. The result is a figurative piece depicting a person welcoming another back from the war.