Designer Richard Malone fashions a tribute to sculptor Alberto Giacometti and his grandmother

Richard Malone, who is artist in residence for the National Gallery of Ireland's 'Giacometti: From Life' exhibition, with pieces from ‘Knot, Bind, Gesture, Bend’. Photo: Steve Humphreys

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August 05 2022 02:30 AM

“I was very conscious of being in a gallery which is traditionally dead artists and works protected in glass cases so I wanted to animate the space.”

You cannot accuse fashion designer and artist Richard Malone of not being productive.

One of the standout stars at London Fashion Week in recent years, Malone’s limited-edition collections of draped and ruched garments are regularly snapped up by a posse of dedicated collectors who have identified him as a designer to watch.

However, over the last eight weeks, the Wexford-born designer has relocated from London and he has been artist in residence at the “Giacometti: From Life” exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland.

During that time, Malone completed up to 50 pieces of works in his contemporary response to Alberto Giacometti, the 20th-century Swiss sculptor whose exhibition in Dublin has been attracting visitors to the Merrion Square gallery since it opened in April.

Putting his usual fashion work to one side and upcoming new season collections, Malone’s new body of work opened to the public last night and is free to view until September 4.

Entitled Knot, Bind, Gesture, Bend, the work covers a range of installations including four free-standing pieces made of melded metal which he worked on at the family home in Wexford and then covered with fabric and stitched in place.

“It is an interesting conversation for me between when I used to work on building sites and also then the difference with female spaces where my grandmother and my mam, taught me how to sew. There’s this real sense of mixing and merging those two worlds,” Malone said.

There are ceramic pieces responding to shape and form, drawings, paintings and large wall-based “mobiles” made with silk jersey and silk ribbons and an air-conditioning unit on site bring the fabrics to life and make them move.

“It really was about capturing motion and form, so everything feels like it’s really animated and active.”

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A key element of this residency was reaching out to the gallery’s community partners including Catherine McAuley National School, the Irish sign language community, dementia support groups and sewing groups in Galway and Roscommon among others, with activities that support diverse, equitable, accessible and inclusive engagement.

During his residency, Malone got access to the gallery’s archives and fell in love with embroideries by the Lily and Lolly Yeats, sisters of the poet, WB Yeats.

“I also kept thinking of traditional ways of knotting and weaving that link us to different parts to Ireland and that really became part of the process and exaggerating those things,” he said.

This is not the first time that Malone has got inside the head of a famous artist. During lockdown, he curated Making and Momentum: In Conversation with Eileen Gray and triggered renewed interest in the Irish designer’s legacy and her influence on contemporary artists.

Malone comes from a very artistic family and it was his late grandmother, Nellie, who taught him to sew and introduced him to the genius of another Wexford native, Eileen Gray.

“It was a strange thing but all of the pieces I sewed for this show were sewn on her machine that she (Nellie) left to me. And when I opened the first layer of her sewing box that she had since the 1970s, all of the colours matched my colour choices for this exhibition. They were very specific colours – not black, white and beige – but colours like sea foam, pink and rust and all the colour threads were there.”

The synchronicity of finding echoes of his own work in the legacy of the woman who influenced him is not lost on Malone, who is set to return to Wexford to choreograph a dance project and to film it.

The job of designing clothes will have to wait just a little while longer.