IT’S 2018. I'm a final year MFA student at NCAD. We are huddled in a dark seminar room awaiting a presentation on "Sculpture" from the then inspirational head of sculpture, Philip Napier, who is fresh back from the 5th Berlin Biennale entitled 'When things cast no shadow.’ Memory serves as the moment is strangely vivid, considering the context of the dark seminar room, my naivete in terms of a personal definition of sculpture, and the focus on Aleana Egan's offsite Biennale contribution which, by most reviewers' accounts, was the one work that could easily be missed or forgotten, standing, as it did, grey and bow-legged in the grey German scrub against grey German industry – a Roadside Picnic if you will. I resurrect this not-so-grey memory because the heated debate that took place in that room in NCAD 12 years ago concerned the nature of contemporary Irish sculpture. Contemporary Irish sculpture was being defined (or cemented) in front of students who'd been sheltered in the institute for two years and knew no better. Egan's contribution stirred feelings in that dark room that day. Her sculpture wasn't grounded in what was being posited as contemporary Irish sculpture that day. It was more detached, unearthed, literary, removed from context – "context" being something that seemed so important to the definition of sculpture being delivered to students in NCAD that day. And yet Egan's example was the definition of sculpture I took away that day, because it was ill-defined; it was neither aesthetic nor moral, private nor public, this nor that. It would form a personal appreciation of sculpture from that day onwards that was somehow otherworldly, art that held a mirror to reality without being grounded in the heavy, rhetorical, deliberate, socially engaged purpose of sculptural ambition I came to know at NCAD. The following decade my eyes were open to 'sculpture' that excavated rather than built, staggered rather than postured, multiplied rather than solidified, popped rather than farted from an embalmed husk of the exclusively casted or carved—such as the original Basic Space Dublin exhibition 'Underground' where the very ground of the temporary warehouse space that the collective of individual artists inhabited, was dug up to form unidentified holes and walls and piles of labour in a defused environment made possible by a fog machine; or months later at a Project Arts Centre also doused in fog, where Sam Keogh's styrofoam mountain arrived excavated, generating sculptures in a meta-birthing pool of process and production; or Marcel Vidal's early expanding foam totems of black and organic globular forms upon which pencil and painted portraits perched in a collision between the fetish of representation and colonial Heart of Darkness; or Eoin Mc Hugh's resurrected dream of an animal carcass on unsteady deer legs as if just birthed from a tar pit at Kerlin Gallery; or David Beattie's Cloudmaker comprised of three timber legs ending in a pyramidal point where water dripped from an upturned 5-gallon plastic container to fall to a vaporiser life on an electric hob at Oonagh Young; or Niall de Buitléar's concentric mounds of card that perpetuated a fossilised world through obsessiveness over craft at The LAB; or Caoimhe Kilfeather's mined sculptures of carved and polished coal that generated imitators by the scuttle-load at Mermaid Arts Centre; or Cliodhna Timoney's colourful and upbeat amorphous forms that inferred music without sound at Eight Gallery; or Hanna Fitz's slapstick world of slanted furniture, rainbow bright and wagging beneath drooping ears and quirky sadness at TBG&S; or Teresa Gillespie's intestinal abjection wounded and wound around the dregs of stillborn liveliness and joy at Wexford Arts Centre; or Maria McKinney’s monstrous catch that formed a hanging garden of tumorous stalactites bejeweled with fake nails at Artbox; or Tom Watt, Tanad Williams and Andreas Von Knobloch's concrete stoop with pool and crawl space for the adventurous at Project Art Centre; or Magnhild Opdøl's glutinous pink serving of stacked donut boxes at Butler Gallery; or Ruth E. Lyons' monumental timber structures that directed our eyes through, up, down, within and without the institution; or Brendan Earley's failed Modernism as flatpack furniture at DHG; or Siobhan Hapaska's penitent and willow-ashen monks that kissed and suffocated at the moment of immolation at Kerlin Gallery. Back in 2008 as a painting department student I looked at the sculpture department as being too concerned with the world, especially the lowly socio-economic world close by in the neighbouring Liberties; while the sculpture department looked at the painting department as a complete waste of time. This was no secret; we knew where we both stood, separate: sculpture grounded in the social and political present, while painting continued to embrace the irrational and private aesthetic of the individual. Aleana Egan's work was an antidote to how sculpture was being defined that day in NCAD. Her work bridged the small gap between the departmental land-grabbing in the institution. It didn't intrude on an already crowded world in Peter Schjeldahl's estimation of sculpture. It stood back like a painting, a material Egan would later embrace in her now trademark loopy skins of paint. Painting was my thing. I had no real idea what had happened to sculpture between the Greeks and Modernism, never mind sculpture in Ireland. My watch began after the MFA as an artist and art critic, and my definition of sculpture was cast by Aleana Egan's shadowless signature in the rough, the dark and the spit of argument. The rest is history🖤