Oisín Kelly

Who was Oisín Kelly?

Oisín Kelly was an Irish sculptor.

Kelly was born as Austin Kelly in Dublin, the son of William Kelly, principal of James's Street National School, and his wife Elizabeth. Until he became an artist in residence at the Kilkenny Design Centre in 1966, he worked as a school teacher. He initially attended night class at the National College of Art and Design and studied briefly in 1948–1949 under Henry Moore.

He originally concentrated on small wood carvings and his early commissions were mostly for Catholic churches. He became well known after he was commissioned to do a sculpture, The Children of Lir, for Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. More public commissions followed, including the statue of James Larkin on Dublin's O'Connell Street.

He figures in five magical lines of Seamus Heaney's second "Glanmore Sonnet":

"'These things are not secrets but mysteries,' / Oisin Kelly told me years ago / In Belfast, hankering after stone / That connived with the chisel, as if the grain / Remembered what the mallet tapped to know."