This sublime sculpture in limestone by Michelle Byrne was acquired in 2013 by the Office of Public Works (OPW) for the collection of the Irish State. The work is a scaled down version of the 1.2 meter limestone sphere commissioned for Ballygarvan National school, Co. Cork.

'Stone Sphere' was part of  'AC3 The Timekeeper', a group show organised by the Olivier Cornet Gallery at Filmbase in December 2013.

We were delighted to hear two years later that this work had been selected to feature in the 2015 OPW touring exhibition titled 'Construct'. Click here to view the catalogue ('Stone Sphere' features on page 58 and 59 in this great publication).

In 2019, we were equally delighted to read about Via Magna in the Irish Arts Review Magazine (Winter edition). We were indeed very grateful to Michelle and arts writer Carissa Farrell for the large section dedicated to the artist's 2014 solo show with us, in this brilliant review of the artist's work and practice:

"...Byrne presented 'Via Magna', a solo exhibition at the Olivier Cornet Gallery in 2014. This was an opportunity to bring together a substantial body of work where she was 'exploring our past and present relationship with the landscape, in particular looking at settlements, boundaries, land divisions and the connecting route'. The exhibition contained multiple works in limestone, bronze, ceramic and plaster. Borris is a perfect sphere in limestone onto which Byrne has sandblasted a distilled map of the Borris area, with fields, roads, dwellings - even a circular rath can be identified superstitiously locked in the middle of agricultural land. Inis is a flat, limestone ellipsoid, whose surface is covered with hundreds of tiny field and road divisions of Ennis in Co Clare. The title work from the show, Via Magna, is an ovoid limestone piece that refers to the Esker Riada, a raised bank of gravel deposited by melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. The Esker Riada of Slí Mór was an important medieval trade and pilgrimage route from Dublin to Galway that now forms part of the M4. Via Magna, Borris, Inis and many other of Byrne's stone and bronze sculptures in this exhibition constitute compressed repositories of multiple histories, geology and culture that she has conjured into tangible form. They are utterly irresistible, tactile and very desirable."