The Forge

He stands in his leather apron, blackened by flying metal filings. His hands are huge inside his protective gloves. His dark goggles give him the eyes of a giant fly. He does not speak because his mouth and nose are covered with a breathing mask and his ears are sealed with headphones. Behind him, the door is open onto the Atlantic, but he hears nothing. He is surrounded by the extreme silence of his work and his solitude, the internal silence underneath the violent screaming of steel.
All around him are the amputated metal off-cuts, pieces of Corten steel which he favours because they rust so well, like a thin layer of dried metallic blood, the same colour as traditional galvanized roofs across the landscape. His working companions are the welding cylinders and the cutting equipment and the angle grinders. And there is a film of rust over everything, over the old CD player and over the picture of the sacred heart, hanging among the tools along the wall. Even his arms and face and lungs cannot escape that fine layer of rust the shade of fake tan.
The shape of his work is created out of the shape of his memory.
The sculptor Ronan Halpin grew up in Drogheda, on the east coast of Ireland, between Dublin and Belfast. His mother and father met on holidays in west of Ireland, in Keel, on Achill Island. They became so attached to the island that every year, they brought their large family of children back to Achill to spend the summers there. So it’s not difficult to understand why Ronan Halpin decided to stay behind and set up is life as an artist in this summer landscape where his parents’ first meeting became mixed with the first memories of his own childhood at Keel.
He creates the arched back of a horse. The square rusted mouth of a horse. The neck of a horse with a frozen metal mane. The head of a horse in poured concrete. Bird shapes petrified in steel flocks. And again the eyes of a horse emerging from pieces of steel that seem to take on animal motion, steel that bends and moves and breathes and runs like horses.
Where do these shapes come from?
As a small boy, Ronan Halpin became fascinated by a print of wild horses hanging on the wall of their summer cottage. It showed a scene of horses in full flight, with manes thrown back and eyes enlarged, an unashamedly romantic image, he says, you might see on a Christmas box of Cadbury’s chocolates. But nonetheless, this image held an unlimited fascination for a young boy’s imagination, even more so because those wild horses were soon to come to life.