Your new exhibition “Conspiracy” features 15 jesmonite heads depicting two elements coming together – the raven and the human. What was your starting point for this exhibition?

I have always been interested in the connection between man and animal. As we become increasingly urbanised and removed from the natural world it has become an obsession to acknowledge this in my work as a figurative sculptor. For me it is a theme that I have wanted to explore and pay rightful homage to power other than ours.

Your work also reveals your interest in myths and symbolism …

Myths and symbolism describe and clarify other worlds. Ravens are harbingers of knowledge, of death, of transformation. They are portals into another place. My idea was to make work that would suggest a blend and coming together of the Human with the Bird, where it becomes impossible to disconnect the two different entities.

The raven pieces should not be viewed as raven overwhelming the human form. They could be construed as a symbiosis of man and animal, or it can be read as man elevating himself above his quotient existence. Many of the works are titled “Conspiracy” because that is the term for a group of ravens.

How does this exhibition fit with your other exhibitions?

Subjectively speaking I feel the purpose of any of the arts is to situate us elsewhere from where we stand. The beginning of this journey began unexpectedly three weeks before my mother passed away 20 years ago; I made a head with a crow and a half shroud which was my way of internalising her loosening hold on life. When I was asked to do a portrait for the National Portrait Collection for the University of Limerick, I made a bird on my head. My last solo exhibition was called “Ecce Homo” which means “behold the man”. It was a series of life-size figures some of whom were wolf based. It has been a theme that I take up and put away as the need demands. These ideas have run through my working life.

How and where do you work?

I do a lot of life drawing so that when I am in my studio working on a figure my knowledge of how that figure should anatomically work is instinctive. It is a very vital part of my practice. I never work from photographs although they can stimulate ideas. For instance, years ago I saw a wonderful image in a newspaper of a couple getting married in a full nuclear suit and mask after the fallout of Chernobyl and subsequently made a work about that.

I work from a studio next to my home. It has two rooms, a workshop with machines, welding gear and concrete floor and a small room for drawing and smaller work that would probably be cast in bronze.

You spent some time in Paris which informed your current work I believe?

I was fortunate to be given a residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in 2017. I used that time to make a series of drawings from the Etruscan collection in the Louvre and Cluny Museum and made many drawings from a wonderful funeral collection in the Cernuschi Museum. It was an amazing opportunity to look at the way these heads were rendered in three different time periods.

Need to Know: Catherine Greene’s solo exhibition “Conspiracy” will be at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square East, Dublin 2, from May 6 – 27. Greene’s work has also included major commissions such as the equestrian memorial of Thomas Francis Meagher in Waterford and the memorial to Dermot Morgan in Merrion Square, Dublin; www.catherinegreene.com.