TOWARDS WEIGHTLESSNESS
Bishop Lucey Park, Cork, 2021
Commissioned by the Glucksman Gallery and National Sculpture Factory for GRAFT

Six copper-plated disc sculptures, made as swings, were suspended from the branches of trees in Bishop Lucey Park. The works were designed for bodily suspension, play and the simulation of weightlessness , connected to the story of Edward Makuka Nkoloso, Zambian schoolteacher, soldier, and self-declared Director General of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, who in 1964 trained twelve afronauts outside Lusaka by swinging them from trees. Irish insurance law prevented the swings from being used. They hung overhead, out of reach.

O'Sullivan was born in Cork and moved to Zambia at nine months old, growing up in Lusaka and then Kitwe in the heart of the Copperbelt, where her father worked as an engineer with Nicholas O'Dwyers - part of a wave of Irish workers drawn to Zambia during independence, when the copper mines were the country's largest employer. Cork has its own history of copper extraction along its coastline. Three of the six discs carry text sandblasted into their surface - direct quotations from Nkoloso, set in a NASA font. The remaining three work with copper patina, the oxidisation and colour change that occurs as metal is exposed to air and rain over time. A text work in copper vinyl was installed around the park's disused circular pond. On a recent visit to Zambia, O'Sullivan travelled to Black Mountain in Kabwe, one of the most polluted places on earth, where a community is pursuing legal action against Anglo American for the toxic landscapes mining has left behind.Photography: Jan Niezgoda