A short trip to Dublin brought the chance to wander round Trinity College, always an enjoyable experience. I’d either failed to notice the strange sculpture on the Berkeley Library forecourt on previous visits, or it has only arrived fairly recently. On a grey rainy day, it looked unpromising from a distance.

On closer inspection, it was fascinating. The large bonze was donated to TCD by the artist, Arnaldo Pomodoro. As the TCD website says, “other similar works exploring this spherical format are on display at locations such as the United Nations plaza in New York, the University of California at Berkeley, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, and the Cortile del Belvedere at The Vatican Museums. This sculpture underwent a major conservation project in 2008 which brought the surface of the piece back to its original condition while also restoring its complex sub-structure and pivot.”

Here are some photos taken as I walked round the work. I was struck both by the reflected ‘cityscapes’ – possibly post-apocalyptic – that seemed to appear, and by the complexity of the construction.

Arnaldo Pomodoro ‘Sfera con Sfera’ bronze (click here for artist’s biography, pdf)

Click here to read the poem ‘Six Ways of Looking at a Pomodoro’ by John Scattergood (pdf document)

Credits: TCD website for info & links; all photos RH