BIOGRAPHY

Rowan Gillespie was born in Dublin in 1953. His family emigrated to Cyprus when he was 3 months old and stayed there until 1963 when they were evacuated. He attended a Quaker school in York and left at the early age of 16 to enrol at York School of Art. He continued his studies in the sculpture department of Kingston College of Art, and briefly at Kunst og Design Skole in Oslo. He lived, married, and exhibited widely in Norway until 1977 when the family moved to Dublin where he set up his own one-man foundry. He lives and works there to this day.

From 1978 to 1986, he held many successful exhibitions in Ireland, at the Lad Lane and Solomon Galleries, in Holland with Galeri Husstege, and internationally, with the Jonathon Poole Gallery, London bringing his work to New York, Cannes, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Cape Town, and Moscow. He regularly exhibited in international group exhibitions including Rencontre avec des Sculpteurs Européens, Pan Amsterdam, Art Expo New York, Art Toronto, Puck Inaugural New York, BCAF Bath, ICAF London, and Art Miami. In 1989, he decided to concentrate solely on site-specific work, which resulted in a number of major public sculpture commissions, initially in Ireland then internationally. He has not yet returned to exhibition work. Possibly his best-known work would be his Migrant series, commemorative sculptures on Custom House Quay in Dublin, Ireland Park in Toronto, and Hobart, Tasmania. Proclamation in Dublin, a personal tribute to his grandfather James Creed Meredith, commemorates those who were executed in Kilmainham Jail in 1916. Titanica remembers those who died on the Titanic. Gallespies work sits in collections all over Ireland and internationally, including National Self Portrait Collection, the National Maternity Hospital, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Friends of the National Collection of Ireland, Bang & Olufsen, Holland, Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, O’ Brian and Harrington, San Francisco, The Brian P. Burns Collection, The Burns Library, Boston College, Office of Public Works, Industrial Development Authority and Wexford County Council.