Eilis O’Connell was born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1953. She studied at the Crawford School of Art in Cork and at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Known primarily as a sculptor she has won public art commissions around the United Kingdom, in the London Docklands area and the Cardiff Bay Arts Trust. She has completed two sculpture commissions for Lismore Castle in Waterford. Now based in Cork, she has a studio in a renovated creamery north-west of Cork and was commissioned to produce a 13.5 meter sculpture in copper and stainless steel for Lapps Quay in the city.
These prints are studies of neural circuits in the brain, the Purkinje neuron showing the network of dendrites that branch off from the centre or soma and first observed by the Spanish physician and scientist Cahal in 1899.
The MRI Diffusion is from a recent MRI scan of Axons in the brain after a stroke, the Axons supply the neurons, when the circuit breaks it can result in brain damage.
“I first got interested in this while collaborating with The Molecular Medicine Dept. in St James’s Hospital for a show called Apertures & Anxieties. I was interested in the confocal microscope that can digitally scan on a molecular scale.”