Under the rain, passersby navigate in single file past steel construction fences around the edge of Temple Bar Square, which is currently being revamped.
Down Crown Alley and along Fleet Street, they hurry over cobblestones, and past granite kerbstones, cut with images, at the edges of the footpaths.
The carvings include a scraggy Irish wolfhound, a fish and fishing rod, an elephant and a pair of vases. There’s no signature saying who made them.
But a spokesperson for Dublin City Council says they are among the early works of a sculptor named Rachel Joynt.
They were commissioned by traders and organisations around Temple Bar, the spokesperson said. But “there is no documentation on them that we can find and nothing on the artist’s website”.
Portrait of a former Temple Bar
Walking west through Temple Bar on Fleet Street is the carving of an Irish wolfhound, just outside Gallagher’s Boxty House restaurant, which has been there since 1988.
It is sitting, its head turned right as if looking up from the kerb.
While usually a symbol of Ireland’s ancient heritage, in Temple Bar it acts as a marker of the cultural quarter’s more recent history.
Joynt created it in 1989, she says. “It was a place that sold coddle, and because it was a traditional Irish food restaurant, I chose the Irish wolfhound.”
Further into the quarter, at the corner of Fleet Street outside Rory’s Fishing Tackle shop, is a second carving, with a fish and a fishing rod.
After this pair however, the symbols become disconnected from their origins. Many of the businesses that commissioned Joynt to create marker kerbstones have closed.
Down Merchant’s Arch, between Temple Bar’s main square and the quays, are a trio of works.
There’s a large vase, which is being filled with water by a smaller floating vase, 0utside a bubble tea café.
Nearby, at the doorstep of the former Merchant Barbers, which closed in 2017, is a scissors and a comb, and a series of Ogham-like lines cut into a shallow gutter.
Along Crown Alley, is an elephant outside where Rudyard’s restaurant used to be, according to Neal Doherty in his book, The Complete Guide to the Statues and Sculptures of Dublin City.
On that same street is a bracelet, chosen for a bead shop, Doherty wrote.
Sandblasting under a teepee
When Joynt undertook the project in 1989, she had just graduated from the National College of Art and Design, she says. “I was just starting to do a lot of work in the ground.”
Her first major commission had been in 1988, she says. That marked what is known as Dublin’s Millennium Year, when Dublin Corporation – as the city government was called at the time – leant into several new civic works, creating public spaces and commissioning public art.
Joynt’s contribution was “The People’s Island”, bronze and aluminium footprints set into the footpath on the traffic island south of O’Connell Bridge.
“I was a student, looking for ways to earn money,” she says. “And then, as an idea I went around the different shops, like the fishing tackle shop, the Bad Ass Café, the shoe shop, and said, ‘Would you like me to do something?’”
In the summer of 1989, she got permission from the corporation for the kerbstone carvings, she says. “I think I did one, and then somebody else would see it and ask for the same thing.”
“It kind of grew to be something that I just did for the summer,” she says.
Joynt sandblasted each image into the stone, not in a studio but on location, she says. “I literally made a little teepee to kind of hold the dust from the sandblasting.”
Some places got a simple two-dimensional image, and others a bronze inlay, she says. “Some got more special treatment like the Bad Ass Café.”
It got a trio of bronze inlays depicting donkey hoof prints, she says.
“It was always busy,” she says. “And people would just be walking around me, stepping over me. That’s the way I worked.”
Expansion
Not all of Joynt’s pieces were created in the summer of 1989.
Like with the hooves outside the Bad Ass Café, Joynt shifted over towards bronze inlays over the following few years.
She made a detailed cast of a film reel, titled “Shutter”, installed outside the front entrance to the Irish Film Institute in 1994, says Casey Hynes, the cinema’s digital marketing officer.
The Temple Bar Gallery + Studios got an abstract shape, resembling an eye.
When Temple Bar was being paved with cobbles, and the gallery’s new building was being built, the piece was put out on the pavement to mark the entrance to the old studio building, says Sadbh O’Brien, the communications and marketing executive at the Temple Bar Gallery. “Just to have a little shadow of the past.”
Doherty writes in The Complete Guide to the Statues and Sculptures of Dublin City that Joynt made 15 of these works.
Four are gone, including a footprint, which Doherty says was created outside a shoe shop, where Leo Burdock’s Fish and Chip shop is today.
Over the last three decades, the donkey hooves outside Bad Ass Café have been slightly damaged, Joynt says.
But as part of the square’s revamp, these will be redone, she said. “And because the entrance to the restaurant has changed, they are going to be slightly reconfigured.”
A spokesperson for Dublin City Council says the council is working closely with Joynt to conserve the hooves as part of its works. It intends to put them back there, they said.
To be glimpsed briefly
Joynt is still slightly perplexed as to how easy it was to get the council’s permission to undertake these works, she says. “It was just by chance, really.”
She had gained a level of trust with the Dublin Corporation through projects like “The People’s Island”, she says. “They knew and kind of supported me. There wasn’t much red tape.”
It coincided with the then-Taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s concerted effort to reimagine Temple Bar as a “cultural quarter”, which began in 1987, according to Haughey’s official website.
Temple Bar wasn’t yet the Temple Bar we now know, she says. “And after all this, everything got more self-conscious when it was recognised as a cultural quarter.”
That the area gets so many pairs of feet now, and so the works are less perceptible, is something she likes, she says.
“Like with ‘The People’s Island’, it’s constantly in flux, and as a student I used to wonder, how would you put a piece of artwork there? It’s too busy,” she says.
One of her most iconic works, 1996’s “Perpetual Motion”, took this idea to another level.
A cement and steel sphere, nine metres in diameter and showing road markings, is on the Naas Bypass, which might seem a bizarre place for a sculpture, she says. “People aren’t supposed to get out of their cars and look at it for very long.”
But it was designed to be something that has to be seen quickly, she says, noting that she likes that her name isn’t visibly tied to the work. “I don’t purposely seek attention. I like the anonymity of this.”
[CORRECTION: This article was updated on 24 November at 1.45pm, to correct a comment by Sadbh O’Brien. Apologies for the error.]