Owner: Derry City Council

Location: Waterloo Place, Derry

Title: ‘The Emigrants’ 1990

Artist: Eamonn O’Doherty

Material: Bronze.

Size: Life size.

Funded By: Department of the Environment

Background: The work, which is intentionally sentimental, consists of seven figures; the main family group, an old couple and a young girl playing at the fountain (the fountain was not designed by the artist). In the family group, the girl carries books and the boy a fiddle, "indicating some of the cultural baggage that the emigrants brought to the New World." The work is quite literal, figurative, and the figures wear contemporary dress. Thematically based on emigration. The sculptor explains that; "Derry was the largest port of emigration in the Northwest during the two great periods of exodus, the first in the eighteenth century and the second in the latter half of the nineteenth century after the great famine."

Artist Details: Eamonn O’Doherty is best known for his large scale public sculptures, five of which stand in Dublin, two in Galway, two in Derry and others in Antrim, Navan, New Ross, Ardagh, Ballymahon, Cobh, Dun Laoghaire, Enniskillen, Cahirciveen, Killarney, Belfast, Liverpool and New York. Among these are landmark works such as the James Connolly Memorial and the "Tree of Gold" in central Dublin, the Galway Quincentennial Sculpture in Eyre Square Galway and the Great Hunger Memorial in Westchester, New York.

He is also a painter and printmaker and has won major awards for painting at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, the Claremorris Open and Arnott’s National Portrait Competition.

O’Doherty took a degree in architecture in U.C.D. and was subsequently Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He has taught at the University of Jordan and was exchange professor at the University of Nebraska and the Ecole d’Architecture in Paris. He has been external examiner at the Ecole Superieure d’Arts Graphiques, Paris and the Dun Laoghaire School of Art. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the Dublin Institute of Technology but is giving up teaching at the end of 2002 to concentrate on artwork.