People’s Island

Rachel Joynt is an Irish sculptor who has created some prominent Irish public art. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1989 with a degree in sculpture.

Her father, Dick Joynt, was also a sculptor. Rachel Joynt is preoccupied by the historical texture of place and in her work she often seems to expose or memorialize the past as a substrate of the present. Her commissions include People's Island in which brass footprints and bird feet criss-cross a well-traversed pedestrian island near Dublin's O'Connell Bridge. She collaborated with Remco de Fouw to make Perpetual Motion, a large sphere with road markings which stands on the Naas dual carriageway and featured as a visual shorthand for leaving Dublin in The Apology, a Guinness advert. She made the 900 underlit glass cobblestones which were installed in early 2005 along the edge of Dublin's River Liffey; many of these cobblestones contain bronze or silver fish.