Caoimhe Kilfeather

As one of the more admired young Irish artists of recent years, Caoimhe Kilfeather has, naturally enough, featured in a good number of respectable group shows. At such gatherings, however, her minimal sculptures have often stood out—or rather stepped back—as notably undemonstrative, even somewhat morose presences. Included among the up-and-coming talent selected for “Holding Together” at Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2010, Kilfeather chose to show a modest early work, Scheflerra Arboricola, 2007: an apparently fragile geometric representation of a household plant, constructed from thin rods of unpolished steel. Keeping to itself in a quiet corner of Douglas Hyde’s grand modernist space, this little linear sculpture cut quite a solitary figure: a wallflower at the party. In 2012, Kilfeather’s main contribution to “Futures”—the Royal Hibernian Academy’s annual

— Declan Long