‘Just so you know,” says Richard Malone before we begin talking, “if you hear any neighing, it’s not me!” The Irish artist is speaking to me from an unusual studio space: a farm in Stradbally, County Laois. It may have the odd equine intruder, hungry for press coverage, but it also boasts huge lambing sheds – the perfect location for Malone to construct his latest five-metre sculptures.
“There’s lovely lambs everywhere and about 20 dogs running around,” he smiles. “Exactly what I’d choose to have around me.”
Malone moved to the farm after being commissioned to create a sculpture installation for the Council of the European Union’s Justus Lipsius and Europa buildings (Ireland takes on the EU presidency this month). Titled Cuimhne agus Séadchomhartha (Memory and Monument), the work will incorporate his colourful fabric creations, which, with their dramatic drapes and folds, appear almost like mythical creatures. The plan, he says, is to rewrite the story of what it means to be Irish.
“A lot of artwork in Ireland was predominantly made by one type of man,” he says, pointing out how much historical work by queer and female artists and craftspeople has been erased or anonymised. “It’s like in museums, where what we see is often the result of what British men on grand tours have chosen. Those men didn’t have exposure to types of labour that involve cloth or stitch. So when they’re discovering, say, the mummies in Egypt and they’re wrapped in these amazing quilts and fabrics, they’re just cutting through them to get to the gold.
“What I’m asking is: why aren’t certain stitch samplers or certain quilts collected? Why are certain artists not on our curriculum?”
Along with the soft sculptures, Malone is fitting out the buildings’ presidency suites with work by contemporary Irish artists, makers and craftspeople: sofas for delegates to sit on, rugs to be walked over, vessels made from burnished wood. All of this is a product of Malone’s background. Born to a working-class family in Wexford, he was given an expert grounding in practical skills by his decorator father. By seven he could drive a car, while he spent his teenage years on various building sites, painting. “I’m very sensitive to colour,” he says. “Because I spent so much time literally watching paint dry.”
Malone didn’t follow a formal route of education – instead, he picked up his love of sewing from his grandmother, intrigued by the way gender determined who carried out certain jobs. His work strives to dismantle such binaries and elevate traditional, overlooked crafts to the form of fine art.
After studying sculpture in Carmarthen, Wales, Malone found himself something of an outsider as a fashion student at Central Saint Martins in London. For a few years after graduating, he found himself a niche making bespoke pieces for “wealthy women”. He was also tapped up by Björk. “My first favourite song was It’s Oh So Quiet,” says Malone, “because as a child you can go really mad to it.” He’s worked with the Icelandic musician on multiple occasions since, designing the striking dress she wore in the video for Atopos. “We’re on a similar wavelength, so it’s all been very natural – no PR involved or brand deals or any of that shit.”
Still, Malone never felt fully at home in the world of fashion. He became disillusioned with peers and celebrities who took on lucrative contracts to promote unethical brands: “All you have to do when they email is say no,” he shrugs. “I think everyone needs a bit more integrity.”
An internship at a luxury brand opened his eyes to the industry’s huge sustainability issues. “So much of the judgment of your work [in fashion] is based on how much you sell. But surely, with the way the world is, we don’t need 100,000 of anything?” He laughs: “I’d always assumed there would be some authority that said, stop, you’ve made enough now!”
Switching to the art world was tricky – people seemed unsure which box to put Malone in. But in 2017 he designed a jumpsuit for a MoMA show called Items: Is Fashion Modern?, which eased the transition. In 2023, he received a call from the Royal Academy of Arts in London: they wanted him to design the centrepiece of their summer exhibition – with just six weeks notice. “I could do it because my father taught me how to weld,” he says proudly of the brilliant blue hanging sculpture, entitled Filiocht Faoi Bhron, as an Dorchadas (Poem in the Dark About Sadness).
Before he died earlier this year, Malone’s father, James, helped out on many of his son’s exhibitions: laying down carpet underlays to cover aesthetically displeasing flooring or “thinking about practical things such as rusting”. He also helped make the vitrines for a show responding to the work of modernist architect Eileen Grey (also from Wexford), which was shown at her iconic villa E-1027 – a building famously vandalised by a stark naked Le Corbusier during what many assume was a fit of jealous rage.
The EU headquarters will be another unusual space for Malone to respond to. “There’s a lot of red tape around the security and safety of the building in terms of bomb threats and things that need to be cleared when there’s a global emergency,” he points out.
Other presidencies, he says, have commissioned “a lot of polished sculptural works, whereas what I’m putting in is quite fragile and delicate, in conflict with all the glass and steel”.
It’s a bold move. But then Malone loves to make us question what we take for granted, to consider how things work and how they might be transformed. And if that means having to take on a horse as a studio assistant, then so be it.