Walking towards Eva Rothschild’s towering, leggy, striped outdoor sculpture at the new North Wall Quay campus of the Central Bank of Ireland, the thought strikes you that the word “banker” has long been a shorthand in popular culture for a boring person; a fun-squasher in children’s stories such as Mary Poppins and Peter Pan.
The Dublin-born artist’s public installations resemble climbing frames and operate as markers for spaces in which to gather, meet, rest. A Double Rainbow, commissioned in 2016 but only being installed now, is public art. Those who interact with it will mostly be office workers based in the shiny, multistorey buildings that are slowly massing along the Liffey quays. It’s also true, however, that the words “central bank”, when the institution occupied an iconic Dame Street site on the edge of Temple Bar, were for many years in Dublin a shorthand for a meeting place.
“There’s a sense that a building of this nature should have a landmark status due to its social standing,” says Rothschild, speaking on the phone from London, where she has lived since 1998. “It’s not just another office block, and that’s the same with commissioning the artwork. If you look at the old bank building and the tree [Éamonn O’Doherty’s 1991 Crann an Óir sculpture] it was very bold to have that building there.”
A Double Rainbow is 10.5m tall with a 14m span and is made from galvanised structural steel, painted black with coloured stripes. In 2011 Rothschild installed a similar sculpture in New York called Empire. “There are numerous archlike structures in my work,” she says. “I feel, when I made that one in Central Park, it did what I want a public sculpture to do — people were meeting under it.”
Of North Wall Quay she says the sense “that it becomes part of the life of the city is what interests me about a public sculpture and, this being a new part of the city, the arch being a way in or a way out”.
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Although they operate more like awnings or gateways, her installations do echo the visual language of climbing frames. “I have actually designed a playground in east London which is open to the public now,” she tells me. “The piece I made for Venice [she represented Ireland at the 2019 Biennale] was for climbing on . . . I am interested in how people engage physically with the artwork. But with a structure like this you actively have to design it so that it is difficult to climb on. In this instance the ‘branches’ are different heights.”
Rothschild grew up in Dun Laoghaire. “One of the reasons I wanted to do the commission was to have a permanent work at home in Dublin. That was really significant for me.”
Of the brief given to her by the Central Bank, she says: “I guess part of their thinking about it in 2016 was they were moving to this new space, the country had come through the worst of the crash in 2008, and the Central Bank was a servant of the people. It was going to be more transparent . . . But my work is not in the service of anything.”
The new HQ is not just an office for bankers, given that it has an archive and a visitors’ centre with a café. “This is a public institution,” Rothschild says. “It belongs to the public and this is a public space around it. Marking that was central to their desire to have a public sculpture there. I assume that’s why they chose mine because it’s about a more social idea of sculpture, a meeting space.”
A Double Rainbow straddles the seating areas outside. “Work in the public space shouldn’t compromise its principles, but it does need to acknowledge that no one has made an agreement to enter this space [containing an artwork] — unlike a gallery. In the public realm you come across something,” she says.
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“What I always want is a sense that you, as the audience, are wanted in the space. This artwork is doing its own thing, but you are welcome here. Sit down, read your book, look at your phone, have your lunch, whatever you are doing. That to me as an artist is really important.”
The sculpture fills the space subtly but definitely: “I wanted it to feel like it just grew out of the ground.” She talks about Dublin’s meeting places — the gates of Trinity College, Clerys’ clock — as starting points full of potential, for a night out, a next step. How the Dublin Docklands will develop as public space remains to be seen, but like the rest of Rothschild’s work this structure includes an implied invitation to play. “When I make work for the public realm, I think about joyous use of the space,” she says.
Rothschild already has a significant international reputation in place. With A Double Rainbow she’s planting her feet in the newly built fabric of her home town.