celinecannon.com

What is Celine Cannon?

Celine Cannon is a sculptor from Ireland who is based in New York. The site identifies her practice as working primarily in stone, fiber and wax — a combination that suggests both carved, permanent forms and softer, more tactile or ephemeral materials.

For a reader trying to place her work: someone interested in contemporary sculpture who follows Irish artists abroad, or a curator looking for a New York–based sculptor moving between hard and soft media, is the likely audience. The material list is the most useful signal here, since it tells you the work is not confined to one tradition.

How to use the site

• Start with the work itself rather than biography; for a sculptor, the objects carry more than the CV.
• Note the stone/fiber/wax range as a guide to what you will see — expect contrasts in weight, surface and durability.
• If you are considering a studio visit, commission or exhibition enquiry, look for a contact route on the site before reaching out.

A practical comparison for interpreting the materials:

As a next step, view the works in sequence and ask whether the three materials appear in separate bodies of work or are combined within single pieces — that distinction will tell you fairly quickly how to read her practice.

What materials does Celine Cannon use in her sculptures?

Celine Cannon works primarily in stone, fiber and wax. These are the three materials named in her own description of her practice, so they are the safest starting point for understanding her sculpture.

What each material tends to mean in practice

• Stone — a traditional, heavy and permanent sculptural medium. Work in stone usually involves carving, and the finished piece is durable, weighty and often shown indoors or in a garden setting.
• Fiber — soft, light and flexible. Fiber-based sculpture is often built, wrapped, woven or stitched rather than carved, which allows for larger or more delicate forms and a very different visual and tactile feel from stone.
• Wax — a malleable material used for modelling, casting and surface work. Wax pieces can be translucent, tactile and more fragile, and wax often plays a role in casting processes as well as in finished work.

The mix matters because it suggests a practice moving between hard and soft, permanent and ephemeral — a contrast that is often the point in contemporary sculpture. If you want to see how she actually combines them, look at individual works rather than the materials list alone: note whether a piece is carved, assembled or cast, and how it is displayed.

For context on sculptors working across unusual material combinations, you can also look at Tate and MoMA, whose collection pages and artist texts are useful for comparing how different sculptors handle stone, fiber and wax.

Where can I see Celine Cannon's sculptures in person?

Celine Cannon's own site does not list exhibitions, gallery representation, or studio visiting hours, so it cannot tell you where to see the work in person right now. What it does establish is the practice: a sculptor from Ireland based in New York, working primarily in stone, fiber and wax. That combination matters for planning a viewing — stone pieces are heavy and usually shown through galleries or institutional exhibitions, while fiber and wax work is more portable and turns up more often in group shows and alternative spaces.

A practical way to find a viewing

1. Check the artist's site first for a news, exhibitions, or contact section. A direct email asking where current work is on view is the most reliable route, and artists generally answer this kind of query.
2. Look at New York–based sculpture venues and non-profit exhibition spaces, which frequently host group shows with emerging and mid-career sculptors.
3. If you are in Ireland, check arts centres and sculpture organisations there too — an Irish-born artist often maintains those connections.

Where to start looking

• Celine Cannon — the artist's own site; use it for contact and any exhibition updates.
• New York Foundation for the Arts — listings and artist resources for New York–based practices.
• Visual Artists Ireland — Irish artist listings, useful if the work is shown in Ireland.
• International Sculpture Center — exhibition and member news across the sculpture field.

Decision criterion

If you want to see a specific body of work rather than whatever happens to be up, email the artist or the gallery handling the work and ask which pieces are currently installed and viewable. If you simply want to encounter the work, group sculpture exhibitions in New York are the likeliest bet, with Irish arts venues as the secondary option.

How does Celine Cannon's Irish background influence her work?

Her Irish background mostly shows up as a set of material and landscape instincts rather than as explicit Irish imagery. The site describes her as a sculptor from Ireland, based in New York, working primarily in stone, fiber and wax — a combination that reads as an engagement with hard, quarried, ground-derived material on one side and soft, bodily, ephemeral material on the other. That tension is a recognisable thread in Irish art practice: stone as the substance of the island's fields, walls, ruins and carved crosses; wax and fiber as the counterside of the body, memory and fragility.

What you can reasonably infer, and what is advice rather than a claim about her work:

• Stone as place. Irish sculpture has a long habit of treating stone as something already shaped by weather and history. A sculptor working in stone after growing up in Ireland often treats the block as a found, aged thing rather than neutral raw material.
• Displacement sharpens it. Working in New York rather than Ireland tends to make "home" a subject you carry rather than a view you have. Materials can become the way that place is remembered instead of depicted.
• The fiber and wax counterweight. These materials are soft, translucent, mutable and often read as skin, cloth or votive objects — a plausible bridge between a Catholic visual culture of candles and relics and a more abstract, contemporary sculptural language.

A practical next step: look at three or four works in stone and compare them with the fiber and wax pieces side by side. Ask whether the stone forms suggest landscape, architecture or the body, and whether the wax pieces suggest preservation or decay. Where the two groups echo each other, that echo is likely where the Irish inheritance is doing the most work — and where it is hardest to separate from her New York context.

For comparison, you can look at how other Irish-born sculptors frame material and place, such as the collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art or the National Gallery of Ireland; seeing her alongside that tradition makes the specific choices clearer than any general statement about national influence could.

Can I commission a sculpture from Celine Cannon?

Yes. Celine Cannon is a sculptor based in New York, originally from Ireland, working primarily in stone, fiber and wax, and her site is set up as a portfolio of that practice — the kind of site artists use to invite enquiries about commissions, exhibitions and studio visits.

H3 How to approach a commission

• Start with the material. Stone, fiber and wax behave very differently: stone suits durable, weighty, often site-specific work; fiber is lighter and more flexible in scale; wax tends to be used for studies, maquettes and cast-related processes. Deciding which direction fits your idea narrows the conversation quickly.
• Be clear about context. Say whether the piece is for a home, a garden, a public space or an institution. Indoor versus outdoor, wall versus floor, and lighting all affect what is realistic.
• Send the practical constraints first. Approximate dimensions, timeline, budget range and any installation requirements. Artists can then tell you what is achievable rather than guessing.
• Expect a staged process. A typical commission moves through an initial conversation, sketches or a small maquette, a firm scope and schedule, then fabrication and installation. Each stage is a natural decision point for you.

H3 A realistic scenario

Suppose you want a stone piece for a garden courtyard. You send a short message describing the space, a photo, rough dimensions and your budget window. From there you would likely discuss material choice and finish, whether a maquette is needed, how the piece will be transported and set, and how long it will take. If stone is unsuitable for your site or timeline, the conversation can shift to fiber or a wax-based study.

H3 Deciding whether to go ahead

Commissioning is a good fit if you want something made for a specific place or idea and you are comfortable with an evolving process. It is a poor fit if you need a fixed object delivered on a short deadline with no design conversation. Before writing, gather a photo of the location, rough measurements, your budget range and any deadline. Then use the contact route on C E L I N E C A N N O N to ask directly about availability, lead times and how she prefers to begin.

What is the significance of using stone, fiber, and wax in contemporary sculpture?

Stone, fiber, and wax matter in contemporary sculpture because each carries a distinct set of associations and physical behaviors, and pairing them lets a sculptor set those qualities against one another. Stone reads as permanence, weight, and geological time; fiber reads as softness, flexibility, and the body or textile; wax reads as mutability, skin, and the cast object. A practice that works across all three, such as that of sculptor Celine Cannon, an Ireland-born artist based in New York, is effectively testing hard against soft, durable against ephemeral, and carved against modeled or cast.

H3 What each material actually does

• Stone: subtractive carving. You remove material and cannot easily add it back, so the process is slow, physical, and irreversible. It suits mass, gravity, and forms that sit in a space rather than hang.
• Fiber: additive and flexible. It can be woven, wrapped, knotted, or draped, and it takes tension and gravity as active forces. It suits thinness, openness, and forms that respond to their surroundings.
• Wax: modelable and castable. It holds fine detail, melts and reforms, and translates well into bronze or other cast media. It suits surface, translucency, and the recording of touch.

H3 Why combining them is more than a materials list

The interest usually lies in the friction between categories. A carved stone mass wrapped or bound in fiber changes how weight is perceived; wax elements can introduce a sense of something soft or bodily next to something geological. Viewers read these contrasts quickly, which makes the work legible even without explanation, but the meaning stays open rather than fixed.

H3 Practical trade-offs to weigh

H3 A concrete reader scenario

If you are commissioning or curating, decide first what the work must survive: outdoor exposure, frequent handling, or long-term storage all push toward stone and away from unprotected wax and fiber. If the point is immediacy and touch, wax and fiber may be the better core, with stone as an anchor.

A useful next step is to look at how the artist describes the relationship between the materials rather than the materials alone — start at C E L I N E C A N N O N and note whether the stone is carved, whether the fiber is structural or applied, and whether the wax is final or a stage in casting. Those three answers tell you most of what the combination is doing.