Breaking the Mould

Breaking the Mould is the story of modern Ireland, told through the work of sculptor Edward Delaney. One of the country's foremost artists, he was commissioned by an assertive state in the mid-1960s to fashion memorials to some of its major heroes, such as the Thomas Davis memorial in Dublin's College Green and the statue of Wolfe Tone in St Stephen's Green. Both of them were celebrations of Irish nationalism at a time when the country was emerging from the torpor of the 1950s and into the prosperity and buoyancy of the 1960s.

Both a memoir of growing up in an artistic / bohemian family, as well as a look at the cultural ferment of the time, author Eamon Delaney crafts an evocative and often moving narrative, which explores his own relationship with his father and the world of sculpture.

Praise for Breaking the Mould:

'Breaking the Mould is the most privately revealing book about Ireland's public art. On the one hand it is an objective and curiously distant investigation of an artist's work. On the other hand, it is a deep and even painful revelation of Eamon's relationship with a remarkable father and in some ways an even more remarkable mother.' Brian Lynch, Irish Independent

'Eamon Delaney's voyage around his father reveals a man so enraptured by the artistic process that in his final years in Connemara he treated the whole world as a sculpture.' Declan Kiberd, The Irish Times