Bio

Murrough O’Donovan is an emerging Irish artist based in West Cork, Ireland. He has a multidisciplinary practice with a focus on exploring ecological issues, how we conceptualise land, ritual practice and mythological archetypes through sculpture and installation. He had his second solo exhibition Navigating the Forest the Fallen Branches of the Somme Oak in April 2026 and exhibited work in the 196th Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition. In 2025 he received the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award and had his first solo exhibition Reach out, pull Me closer  in Backwater Artist’s Studio 12 gallery. O’Donovan is currently studying an MA in sculpture at The Royal College of Art in London for which he received the President and Vice-Chancellor’s UK Scholarship and the Liu Shiming Art Foundation Bursary.

Artist Statement

My practice has always been directed by my deep love of nature and wildlife. As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the natural world, collecting insects in the garden, fishing with a net and a bucket in ditches, ponds and tide pools, endless zoo and wildlife park visits and adventures in the countryside. For much of my life I believed I would be a zoologist or marine biologist. I strayed from this course when a serious long term illness took me out of school at the age of 16. During this illness I began to rely on art as a way of exploring my love of the natural world that I was no longer able to physically experience. While I am now recovered from this illness, that passion is still the core of my practice.

My work explores the current ecological crisis being globally perpetuated by industrial resource extraction and urbanisation in the Anthropocene. Through sculpture, installation and drawing I seek to create a visual expression of the destruction we are witnessing across the biosphere and how we can try to amend our ways of using and viewing natural resources and land through ritual practice, experimental cartography and mythological archetypes. My work centres around using the mythological archetype of the world tree, such as Yggdrasil of the Mayan Tree of Life. I partially sculpt tree branches with a variety of techniques covering them in maps and repeating patterns using them as avatars to express human interference in ecosystems and the physical landscape. I then use these sculptures to create installations that function as ritual spaces for people to explore their connection with the natural world and their relationship with the non-human.