SCULPTURES REFLECT BOMBARDED CITY

Article from THE CORK EXAMINER, by Hilary Pyle

August 28, 1987

The exhibition of relief sculptures by Douglas Holmes, showing at the Triskel Arts Centre, under the title of "the Belfast Series," is all the more remarkable for having been executed by a man who had never set foot in Ireland at the time he was doing them. Douglas Holmes from San Francisco is of Irish extraction. He had his first taste of the Northern tragedy from photographs and news reports; and it was these photographs which inspired him to explore the Belfast situation in small lead additive sculptures. His growing ambition was to bring the series as a group to Ireland. The exhibition tour was arranged this year, to travel from Belfast to Dublin and Limerick; and it has finally arrived in Cork. At first sight this group of eleven expressionless rectangles is daunting. They are small, the concept minimal. in some ways -- as a group of flat grey metal artifacts -- they are downright repellent. Gradually the sense of a bombarded city, and its remaining sensitivity, grows on one. The reliefs take the form of a street, the images linked by the numbers one would usually find on a street door. It's an exhibition which brings to mind problems not purely local, at the same time dealing specifically with the tragedy on our doorstep; and it should not be missed.