Rachel Joynt

Rachel Joynt (born 1966 in Caherciveen, County Kerry) is an Irish sculptor who creates public art. She graduated from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1989 with a degree in sculpture.^[1]

Her father, Dick Joynt,^[2] was also a sculptor. Rachel Joynt is preoccupied by ideas of place, history and nature, and her work often examines the past as a substrate of the present. Her commissions include People's Island (1988) in which brass footprints and bird feet crisscross a well-traversed pedestrian island near O'Connell Bridge in Dublin. She collaborated with Remco de Fouw^[3] to make Perpetual Motion (1995),^[4] a large sphere with road markings which stands on the Naas dual carriageway. This has been described by Public Art Ireland as 'probably Ireland's best-known sculpture' and was featured, as a visual shorthand for leaving Dublin, in The Apology, a Guinness beer advertisement. Joynt also made the 900 underlit glass cobblestones which were installed in early 2005 along the edge of River Liffey in Dublin; many of these cobblestones contain bronze or silverfish.