Patrick Scott 'Kite!' (1977) acrylic on canvas 622 x 622cm
Location: On temporary loan to Maynooth University (NUIM) - The John Hume Building, until 2018
Bite-sized info:
Donated by Scott Tallon Walker architects for the Luce Hall, Trinity College Dublin
The work hung originally in the Luce Hall but is temporarily on loan to Maynooth University (NUIM) until 2018 when it will return to Trinity College Dublin, to a brand new context - the new School of Business.
The following is transcribed from a conversation between the artist and Catherine Giltrap, Curator of the College Art Collections, 1st September 2010
"I had the cartoons – they were just rolled up and I was going to burn them actually.. which I did finally burn them, but I traced it onto this bit of fabric. And the fabric I got from V’Soske – it’s big course cotton weave, it’s what they use for their tufting, they tuft onto it. They just gave it to me and I .. it’s quite big but I traced it through the holes made by the cutting wheel. So it came out like this. Except then I got friends to come up to the mountains to a house I have in Wicklow up in the hills. We had it all spread out there and these friends just crawled all over it painting it with an acrylic. It’s virtually the same as the tapestry [Blaze] except the middle is just blank. There was a kite exhibition in Kilkenny one arts week and we were all invited to make kites, so I thought I’d make that into a kite. Then I had to work out how many people it would take to launch it and I discovered it would take 30 people. I went ahead with it and I put all the fixings on it – all the wires and hooks and things. There were strings coming from it, masses of them. There were all these people running across the castle garden. It was just a joke really because there is no way you could ever fly it! We never tried to fly it but it hung in Kilkenny, in the Castle."
'Kite!' is one of three large-scale works by Patrick Scott which have been integrated into an architectural context at Trinity College to create a stimulating environment for research, teaching and learning. 'Berkeley' was commissioned by Ahrends Burton Koralek architects for the entrance hall of the Berkeley Library in 1967. 'Lotus Pond' was commissioned and donated by Ronald Tallon of Scott Tallon Walker architects for the O'Reilly Institute. As of March 2017, we are happy to announce that this magnificent work has been relocated to The Daly Boardroom of The Financial Services department of the University in order to facilitate a major refurbishment project at the School of Nursing and Midwifery.
'Kite!' was displayed in 2014 as part of the major retrospective 'Patrick Scott: Image Space Light' staged by The Irish Museum of Modern Art at both IMMA and VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow
The work was also featured in one of our exhibitions celebrating 50 years of Modern Art at the University, ‘George Dawson: An Unbiased Eye. Modern and Contemporary Art from Trinity College.’ The Royal Hibernian Academy (19th November – 19th December 2010)