Brushing Up: A seven-metre garden shark on Clontarf Road

On the corner of Haddon Road and Clontarf Road, a long black basking shark looked to be swimming along by the bushes in somebody’s front garden.

It was suspended above an upturned currach, acting as its base, partially concealed by some weeds and long grass.

The nose, dorsal fins and the top of its tail was splattered with white seagull droppings.

It has lived outside this particular red-brick two-storey home, which looks out on the Clontarf Promenade, since the summer of 2019, according to Google Street View.

The shark has swum around a few times. 

First, it was beached on the gravelly driveway near the footpath. Later, it moved in towards the hedges, with its gaping mouth directed towards the semi-detached home itself.

On Wednesday, its mouth was pointed towards the Clontarf Road.

It’s called Craiceann, the Irish word for skin, and a nod to the mythological sea creature known as the kraken, says John Coll, the sculptor who created it from parts of an old currach boat.

Craiceann is something of an outlier for Coll, who tends to work with bronze. He didn’t create it for any particular exhibition, he said over the phone on Thursday. “It was just my own, y’know, madness.”

Trained first as a marine scientist, Coll has always been fascinated by the maritime world, he says. “It seeps into everything I do, and I had just wanted to have a go at making a big shark.”

“So yeah, it was, I think my ego took over and I started,” he says.

Maritime youth

Coll was born in Galway city in 1956, and grew up in Taylor’s Hill, he says.

His mother was a primary school teacher, and his father taught chemistry in the University of Galway, known then as University College, Galway (UCG), he says. “We all went to university, because in those days, if you’re the child of one of the staff, you got in for free.”

Coll ended up studying zoology, he says. “I was one of those guys who was mad into nature, nature studies, birds and animals. And in Galway, the emphasis was, of course, on the marine side of things.”

After graduating, he got a job working at the Carna Research Station – an aquaculture research and development facility – in south-west Connemara, he says. “And worked away there for six or seven years.”

Throughout all of this, he was working as an artist on the side, until, aged 27, he decided to give sculpture a go, he says. “I decided ‘Right John, you’d better see if you can make a career out of something other than fish farming.’”

He enrolled in a foundation art course at the Regional Technical College, Galway, he says. “I went for a year. That confirmed my suspicions that I would be a better sculptor than a fish farmer.”

It was there that he encountered the sculptor John Behan, he says. “John introduced me to welding, and brought me up to Dublin and showed me the bronze casting foundry.”

“I decided that yes, metal was the way to go,” he says.

Bronze and boats

Coll’s bronze statues are scattered throughout the city.

His monument for the author Brendan Behan sits on a bench by Binn’s Bridge next to the Royal Canal, and over at the Grand Canal beside Wilton Park is his Patrick Kavanagh.

On South King Street, beside St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, sits his life-sized Luke Kelly, playing the banjo.

The basking shark was a rare instance where he decided against bronze casting.

He conceived of it during a phase in which he was examining materials that are used by people in their interactions with marine environments, he says. “Tar and canvas would be one of them.”

Currachs were a big point of interest, he says. “I did a thing around this time where I got a couple of lobster pots, tweaked them, and the lobster pots became a currach.”

Coll bursts out laughing down the phoneline at this point.

Being from the west of Ireland, he had memories of going out to the Aran Islands and seeing currach boats upturned on the beaches, he says. “Going up, smelling the tar, feeling the lovely surface. They have an almost animal-like hide to them.”

Around 16 years ago, he caught wind that somebody had a currach out in Dún Laoghaire, he says. “He wanted to get rid of it. He was gonna burn it.”

Coll bought it for €150, he says. “I thought it was going to be a two-man currach. It turned out to be a four-man currach.”

It was long, he says. “So here I was. I had this currach, and I always had it in my head that I’d do something with that lovely skin of the currach.

Tar is a bitumen to work with

Around the time he got the currach, Coll had also been thinking a lot about basking sharks, he said. “You know these guys are hunted, and I thought to tie the two things together.”

Their population around Achill Island was almost wiped out in the 1950s and ’60s, says James O’Connor of the boating tour guide agency Achill Seascapes. “The population has been good in the last 20 years.”

Up until the 1970s, some of these sharks would be hunted by people in currachs, Coll said. “And here I was using the skin of the currach to make the shark.”

He began with a small model, about two feet in length, he says. “It was plaster and then cast in bronze.”

Then, he scaled up the model, and created a skeleton for the shark out of steel rods, he says. “I put a galvanised mesh, and then over the mesh I started to work with the tar.”

“Terrible pun, but tar is a bitumen to work with,” he says. “Oh god, I had so many pairs of clothes that got ruined. Once you get it on you, you can’t get it off.”

It was roughly seven metres long, he says. “The size of the currach would be a juvenile basking shark. But there’s a record off Achill where the record one was 11 metres.”

Once completed, he kept it at his studio on Leeson Street, where it caught the eye of John Reynolds, one of the founders of Electric Picnic, he says. “He happened to be coming by, and stuck his head in and said, ‘Oh, I like this, could you bring it down?’”

It went to the festival in 2011, he says. “I got a free ticket, and it was fascinating watching people interact with it. Selfies were taken, and eventually they started getting into the mouth of the shark.”

When Coll relocated to a studio on Sheriff Street, Craiceann joined him, he says. “Jaysus, I was stuck with this thing.”

Naturally, when a friend out in Clontarf offered to take it off his hands, he leapt at the chance, he says. “Great. Because it was a big, long, unwieldy thing.”

The whole shark took only about two months to make, he says. “It came together fairly pronto. Once you’ve made the frame, it was just basically a matter of heating the tar felt, and blending it. Just like putting on bloody wallpaper.”

“I’ll never do it again,” he said. “It’s horrible.”