Murrough O'Donovan
Artist Bio
Murrough O’Donovan is an Irish artist from Skibbereen in West Cork currently based in Cork City. He graduated from Crawford College of Art and Design with First Class Honours in Fine Art in 2024. For his work exhibited in Lest We Salt the Earth the 2024 MTU Degree Show he received the Backwater Studios Ciaran Langford Memorial Bursary and a Graduate Residency in the Sculpture Department of Crawford College of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
My sculptures are an expression of the destructive forces of urbanisation, deforestation and humanity’s exploitation of the natural world and the traumatic effect ecological destruction has on individuals and society. Using sculpture, I want to express feelings of violence, abuse and trauma in an effort to portray the damage humanity has inflicted upon to nature and the impact living through such events has had on me.
I make my sculptures and installations out of broken branches and logs taken from an old beech tree that fell in the woods surrounding my home in West Cork, woods that are threatened by the expansion of the nearby town. I manipulate the wood in violent ways that risks totally destroying the branches; drilling, carving, hammering and cutting. I want my sculptures to look as though they have been attacked and mutilated. I also carve patterns and reintroduce pieces of wood to represent our exploitation of the natural resources of the world to create our cities and infrastructure.
I display my work taking inspiration from The World Tree archetype: the branches in heaven, the trunk in our realm and the roots in the underworld. The tree has been ‘butchered’, taken apart and displayed as trophies. The broken connections between branches mirror the broken links in ecosystems around the world caused by our exploitation of natural resources.
Membership: Backwater Artists Network & Ciaran Langford Memorial Bursary 
