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The longest of the artworks on the Island City Sculpture Trail, Sentinels runs the full length of Carey’s Lane. At 120 metres, it is almost exactly as long as Dublin’s Spire is tall. The lane itself is quite narrow – just a little over 3 metres wide, and Sentinels runs close to the middle of the lane for most of its length.
Interconnected beams of treated cedar wood are suspended over our heads, with stainless steel fixings and bright red thick sailing rope used to attach them firmly to the walls on either side of this narrow passageway. Originally a warm brown when the artwork was first installed, the cedar will slowly silver over time.
At either end of the lane there is a flat section of wood that is attached at a right angle to the wall, and lit by a natural white neon light strip. A seagull perches on this beam at both ends of the lane – our sentinels. Matching the shape and scale of a seagull, these birds have been cast in black standing out like silhouettes, and echoing other public sculptures of people, which tend to be black, like cast iron. Both seagulls hold in their beak a golden nugget – a replica of a chicken nugget, cast in jesmonite and covered in gold leaf.
Along the full length of the lane, the jointed sections of wooden beams seem to trace the path of a bird in flight, as one beam bolts to another, changing direction and height, and paced like the beats of the wing, starting at 3.5 metres above the ground, and soaring to 6 metres in places.
Though not a part of the artwork, there are small warm-white fairy lights hung in garlands along the lane which highlight the fixings when illuminated in the evening.
