“I’ve been working on this collection since I came back from Italy, and thinking about it for a lot longer. For what I want to do, combine realism with imaginative expressionism, sculpture is the perfect medium. In print and TV, we’re pepper-sprayed with visuals every hour of every day these days. It’s become very easy to tune it out as visual noise – somehow, for me at least, sculpture isn’t like that. Maybe it’s because it’s not an image of something but (seemingly) the thing itself – with mass and dimension, that it still demands our undivided attention. And maybe that’s why bad sculpture is so offensive, and great sculpture so sublime.
I’ve worked hard to try to make these pieces capture the imagination in the way Dante captured mine.”    —Aidan Harte, July 7, 2009

“Dante obsessed me when I studied sculpture in Italy. The Inferno contains a world of characters, but I chose to sculpt only those which spoke to my life. Each piece relates to a verse, recreating Dante’s journey in Hell….”    —Aidan Harte (retrieved on January 16, 2010)

See more sculptures by Aidan Harte at Sol Art Gallery, Dublin, Ireland.

Contributed by Guy Raffa